Off Site Storage & Backups for Your Files

After seeing the people's house behind mine catch on fire one evening, I started thinking, what would ever happen if I lost my house. Or even just my computer or my backup drive? Then I realized I didn't have my files stored off site. I know a lot of folks burn two copies of their disks and store one on-site and one off. But I didn't have an off-site location to store mine. I decided to created backups of everything to date and when I went to visit my family over the holidays, I left my duplicate DVDs with my mom, 3 hours away. Good plan to start, but what if my system went down and I needed something sooner rather than later? So I began the search for an online backup to use as well. I'm on a Mac and needed something that would work well with Mac, welcome to problem number one. Most of the online backups that were reasonably priced were made to work with Windows. I stumbled across MobileMe from Mac, easily syncs to my computer and I can back-up up to 20GB of files.

I've stored all of my client's purchased jpeg files, proofs and current working files on there. Clients know that there files are on record for one year, so the plan is every 4 months to clear out any files that are more than a year old. I will still have a DVD copy of any files over a year old at both my home and my mother's home, so no need to keep older files on MobileMe for more than a year. For $99 a year, you you get 20GB, not a bad deal at all. For an extra $49 a year you can store 40GB and 60GB for an additional $99. So if I get to the point where I know I'll be storing more than 20GB, I'll have additional options.

Hopefully I'll my system won't crash or my house destroyed by natural disaster, but just in case, it's nice to know that all my current client files, as well as my forms, actions and other purchased files are backed-up online as well.While MobileMe might not be the type of storage you're looking for, I highly suggest if you don't have a backup plan in process, get one now! You never know what could happen to your home or studio and of course computers and backup drives aren't perfect and may fail!