One online storage site with a difference is www.carbonite.com, where for $49.95 a year (about £25) you get unlimited backup space, but not only that, all the files in your computer are backed up automatically as you create them – brilliant. So once you’ve done the big initial upload upon signing up the rest is easy – you can also set times for scheduled backups if you think the constant auto-backup is going to slow down your web connection. Like a lot of the forward-thinking storage companies now, Carbonite are offering a revert to different edits of a document, in case you perform a silly change then save it, and keep deleted files for 30 days as a safety net in case of mind-changing or mistakes.
There’s a free 15 day trial – try Carbonite here.

Just been checking out www.4shared.com which is an online storage site offering 5GB of space in a free account, with the option to upgrade on a special offer for $39.95, which gives you 20GB for 1 year at 10GB bandwidth. Seems a nice easy-to-use interface and simple sign-up, although the expiry date of the (free) account is set at 30 days since last log-in, so I hope there’s an email alert – but I guess if you leave it 30 days then you’re not that bothered about it anyway. Worth a try I’d say, as with all of these free accounts it’s another place to store those precious files for free, and you can’t be too careful!
Try it now –

We may well worry about how to backup our favourite songs and family photos, but professional online storage is another world. To take an extreme case, imagine the needs of someone like movie company DreamWorks Animation, who use a parallel file server software from Ibrix to speed up the massive access requirements of their artists working on films like Kung Fu Panda, currently in production. The system has to cope with 75,000 – 100,000 batch-processing jobs per night, as artists work on animation frames for anywhere between a few minutes and around 15 hours, depending on the complexity of the sequence. DreamWorks’ Chief Technology Officer Ed Leonard explained;
“We needed super performance file storage and access so when 2,000 computers start asking for the same texture file for one of the characters, our system isn’t overweighed by I/O.” Scenes that once took two hours to create are now completed in seconds and, says Leonard, “…that’s pretty remarkable, and we’re scratching the surface on where we are going with this.”

Thanks to Darren I’ve had more of a demo of Time Machine, and despite not being a remote storage option it’s pretty cool. It seems to me like having an infinite ‘undo’ on everything, for example if you’ve deleted something in iPhoto 4 days ago you just go back to that point (in your Time Machine, see?) and get said deleted file. You can do this in applications, documents, allsorts – check out the demo on the Apple site.

Apple’s new operating system Leopard has a feature called Time machine, which automatically backs up your Mac to a connected external hard drive, which is great but as pointed out in this article by James E Gaskin, if your machine is stolen the same fate will probably befall the hard drive and ditto if your house burns down! Now if Apple offered an online storage facility free to all it’s registered users wouldn’t that be a good selling point? Or co-ordinated a shared use of unused memory on the world’s Macs as a memory pool for Mac users to backup to?

I want to backup all the camcorder video I’m doing, currently on mini DV tape – firstly, I don’t want to keep buying new tapes and end up with hundreds in a cupboard, secondly I want it backed up as it’s all precious family stuff. Online storage is the obvious answer but when it comes to video there’s nothing free due to the upload limit for individual files, unless you upload stuff scene by scene which would be a chore. The Mediamax Elite deal is not bad, having as it does 250GB of storage and no individual filesize limit – pretty good for $10 a month, however I think even an advocate of online storage like myself feels the need for a physical copy of my kids growing up on video. Therefore I guess it should be one of the 500GB USB 2.0 drives on offer these days for anywhere upwards of £60-70, stick all the raw video on there (apart from obviously binnable stuff) and then backup up the edited highlights on DVD as well.
Check out the page on physical memory in the main site for the best places to buy memory…

Read a very good article by Rob Enderle about backing up files in the light of (excuse the pun) the fires in California – he goes one stage further than advising backing up your digital files by suggesting that scanning paper documents is just as important – read it on tgdaily. It’s a good point too – some of the most important documents we have predate the digital age, such as birth certificates, paper driving licenses and old photos, and are the most precious.