If you do a lot of writing you should seriously consider having those documents backed off online/offsite, so that you won’t lose everything if Henny Penny turns out to be a realist and the sky does fall. Here’s some free options:
1) use a online storage service such as Adrive. Adrive has a useful file sharing option, but I don’t use it for backups because such services are well known for ceasing to provide service. Also, I haven’t been able to ascertain how reliable and secure Adrive is.
2) Gmail has a 20Mb attachment limit so provides a realisitic backup option. The trouble is that if you have a large number of documents managing the backups will be an organisational headache at best.
3) You can copy and paste your documents to a private blog. WordPress allows you to search the content of posts and has categories and tags, but to me this seems like a clumsy and labour intensive backup method. E.g. if you amend a document on your computer you have to find the relevant post and alter it.
4) Google Docs is the best option in my humble opinion, primarily because it is a word processor with storage space and therefore ties in nicely with the word processing that you are already doing. Moving all your documents to Docs and working on them there is an option with many merits.
Here’s a fraction of what Docs will allow you to do, quite apart from simply editing and storing documents:
- search within your documents
- place documents in multiple folders
- link to other documents
- real-time editing of documents together with people who are on the other side of the world
- publish your document as a web page that anyone can view
I have written A Practical Guide To Selected Features Of Google Docs and a lot more information can be found there. A link to this guide can also be found in the sidebar to the right.
I’m currently in the process of evaluating Zoho.
Do you have any other ideas for backing up large numbers of documents?
KP's Computer Counsel 