computer blue screened -Online computer backup?????

[tripletots]

Our computer has blue screened three times now, I think blue screened means crashed. We have years of pictures on our computer and I am terrified of losing them.

Does anyone use an online backup company? I assume that would mean if our computer crashes and will not restart, we can purchase a new computer and reload our stuff from the online backup company?

My DS19 who is away at school tells me our computer has 1TB and that it's in 2-500GB's. He says I should just switch over to the other drive. Anyone know how to do that?

I guess you all can tell I'm really computer illiterate, since I don't seem to know what I'm talking about. I just don't want to lose all my precious pictures.

 

[RitaE]

I use mozy.com but I don't recommend them anymore since they raised their prices and limited capacity. You might check out Carbonite, they're offering a free 3 months right now.

http://www.carbonite.com

I also use Dropbox.com and Amazon just started a new cloud service. If your son has an edu email you can double your amount of free space

https://www.dropbox.com/edu

Also, all those places like Snapfish will store your pictures for free as long as you place one order a year.

But it sounds like a fairly immediate need. I'd get an external hard drive and plug that in for an onsite reliable back-up. Then you'll have some time to consider your online options.

 

[jlewisinsyr]

We use Carbonite, and it's been great. I can remotely access the files that have been backed up too.

The only part I don't particularly like is that video files are not automatically backed up, so you must manually choose them. We have a media server that stores all of our DVDs digitally so we can retrieve them from any of the media centers in our house and when we add DVDs to the server we have to manually choose to back them up.

I agree with the PP too, it sounds like you may have more of an immediate need, which might not work well for an online back-up service that runs in the background. Upload speeds of DSL, Cable, FIOS is not as fast as download so it can take weeks to back up 100 GB of data (I don't know how much you have, but we're well beyond 2 TB of data). Since your need is more immediate, I'd buy a external drive and get the data of the PC first! I'm not a big fan of local back-ups because they usually are no safer then the data stored on the original drive.