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It's important whether you're a business or a home computer user that all of your important photos, videos, documents, and information is backed up some where some how. It's impossible to know when a computer crash can occur, and being prepared is the only defense you have against it when it happens. This article is going to explain 3 simple steps to follow when backing up a PC hard drive online. You can start and complete the entire process in about 10-15 minutes and just leave your computer to complete the backup on it's own. So if you're ready, I'm ready let's get started. Step 1 – Choosing a Backup Provider The first step is choosing a service provider to be your online backup service. I suggest Carbonite, but you can also use Mozy home, or file sync services that also provide backup such as BeInSync. Which every service you provide most offer some form of free trial or free space arrangement to test the service before you have to pay. So you should be able to go and sign up for the service without having to spend a test and get everything setup. Once you're signed up their will be a piece of software to download. This is the software that connects your computer to the backup services secure servers. Step 2 – Choosing Files and Folders for Backup After you've chosen which provider, and downloaded and installed the software provided you need to choose which files and folders you want backed up. The majority of these desktop programs for online backup auto select your My Documents folders by default. If there are documents in other parts of your computer you'll want to also add those to the backup set. Remember: Backing up complete programs you have on CD etc. isn't really worth the time since you can always reinstall them at a later date if needed. What makes using a service like Carbonite or Mozy so great is that once you add a file or set of folders to your backup set any new files, or files modified within that set will automatically be uploaded during the next backup to keep the newest version of the file on hand at all times. Step 3 – Let's Upload those Files OK so we've installed the backup software application, selected the files and folders we want stored online. Time to upload those files to the backup server. Don't worry you don't have to do this manually, the program will take care of it all. All you have to do is tell it to start the initial backup. From there that's it, the process will be completed on it's own. The initial backup can take some time, anywhere from 2-3 hours to a day or two is totally possible depending on how many files you need backed up. You don't need to watch this happen as it's about as exciting as paint drying but I do urge you to leave your computer on while this happens. So that's it, you've successfully backed up a hard drive online. If you've read through this article without doing any of the steps I urge you to go back to step one and do it. You never know when a crash could happen so the best time to backup your important data is right now. Get started right now with backing up your harddrive online. We've reviewed the company I suggested above here in this Carbonite review. Also another alternative to checkout that backs up files and also keeps them synchronized across multiple computers is BeInSync. We've written an unbiased and detailed review of their service as well here in our BeInSync review.
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