They don’t try to cram every bell and whistle into the program, and follow up with endless bug fixes trying to keep it all working. Instead you can sign up for a free trial (no credit card required – aren’t you glad we have pushed past THOSE days?)
You have gigabytes of wedding and baby pictures on your MacBook and someone recently told you that even a Mac hard drive will eventually fail (who’d a thunk?)!
All you want is to not worry about losing your precious pics and now a few videos besides.
Oh, and your recipes, yeah, want to keep those too. And better have a backup of that tax return, after spending all weekend on it you sure don’t want to lose it now.
(Have I made my point yet????)
No one wants to lose data, and no one wants to have to learn a new complicated program.
In fact, if you keep your data in the “My Documents” folder of your PC – the default for most Windows software – the default installation of ZipCloud will work just fine.
Doesn’t matter if you use a Windows PC or a Mac, ZipCloud will work.
IDrive is one of our most highly recommended online backup services for most types of users and they are constantly improving their service.
IDrive Now Supports Linux Data
Just a few months ago IDrive upgraded their data infrastructure which now allows them to store Linux data.
Does that mean they have a Linux application?
Sadly, no, but they do offer an open set of API’s (application programming interface) that enable anyone to write their own custom application for the IDrive cloud storage back-end.
Hopefully, each Linux distro will begin to have someone write an app using these API’s and release them to the users.
While this may not be the answer you were hoping for, it is an upgrade from what the answer was 6 months ago, which was a “not at all”.
Many other improvements have come about at IDrive in the last few months that we will share in other posts on the site.
In the meantime, for all Windows, Mac and mobile devices, why not:
You decided to sign up for a MyPCBackup Trial Account and the next thing you know you get an email that says “Your Account Has Been Flagged” in the subject.
Well, we are all for innovative, honest, marketing techniques but this one does go a little over the top, designed to scare you into opening the email, no doubt.
Does that mean the folks at MyPCBackup are a bunch of crooks? We don’t think so as we regularly correspond with one of the big shots over there and he seems pretty decent.
What To Do When MyPCBackup Flags Your Account
Nothing.
Your trial account with MyPCBackup is, unfortunately, a paltry 15 MB; fits a few photos. So the “flagged” email saying that you have files that are not backed up, well, no kidding!
The thing to do with MyPCBackup is get the trial account, backup a few files, then go online to your MyPCBackup Dashboard and take a look around.
We always recommend doing a test restore, preferably from another computer.
If it sounds OK, and plays from beginning to end, then backup & restore is successful
Sign up for a full account with MyPCBackup
Backup ALL of your important files to their cloud servers so your data is protected.
Use That Flagged Email For A MyPCBackup Discount Coupon Code
The one advantage to the “Your Account Has Been Flagged” email is that it comes with a MyPCBackup discount code link to save money on a full MyPCBackup account.
Is it the best deal you can get on MyPCBackup?
That’s hard to say for sure; they offer 20% off with that link (and this could change at any time). If you hold off for another day or two you might find a steeper discount in a subsequent email from them. Then, of course, you might not. That’s always the risk with online discounts, coupons and deals. They can come and go in the matter of hours, at times.
We like MyPCBackup for unlimited online storage because that is not only hard to find but hard to find at that good of price. And now they offer limited, but still a LOT, of storage for a lesser price as options too.
While we don’t care for scare tactics or excessive emails pestering potential customers, they do test and probably found that those strategies worked. The online backup space is competitive so use that to YOUR ADVANTAGE and get MyPCBackup at the best deal they offer.
“Your Account Has Been Flagged by MyPCBackup” Video:
Here is a transcript of the video:
Hi, and welcome to Online Backup Spot.
In this short video, what we’re going to talk about is “MyPCBackup”, which has been one of our favorite recommended online backup services; but we have noticed—as we do test these things periodically—when you sign up for a free trial with My PC Backup and get started, you start getting a lot of emails from them.
And this is just a little bit more aggressive than what a lot of people are accustomed to, and even like.
But the one in-particular that’s getting a lot of questions is this one right here that says: “Your account has been flagged”…
Oh my gosh, WHAT HAPPENED?
Well, you know, I think it’s just kind of a ploy, if you will, to get you to open the email. Because as you can see, we only started this free trial on March the 8th.
Here’s a welcome message, “your backup is complete” – which isn’t much, keeping in mind, the free trial’s only fifteen megabytes of space or whatever anyway, so—we only had a couple files on this machine.
So the backup’s complete, but yet just a few hours later, your account’s been flagged…
And what it tells us is, your account has been flagged as having outstanding files which need to be backed up. Hmm…yeah, no kidding!
I’ve got gigabytes of stuff on my computer, and even if I had purchased a full account from you, there’s no way it would’ve all gotten backed up in the amount of time it took for me to get this email from them.
BUT, never fear, there is a silver lining in this cloud. And here they have a 20% off link so that they want you to sign up, actually get a paid plan, convert your free trial into a paid plan—and I don’t blame them for that, it’s a very competitive industry, and they’re trying to get your business—and they’re trying to do so in a way that I like, by reducing the cost of doing business with them, and here is the 20%-off link.
So the first thing I want you to do is DON’T panic when you see this “your account has been flagged” email; and instead, maybe wait just a day or two.
Now, I do want you to try out My PC Backup, and I want you to make sure it’s going to work for you. Go ahead and back up a few files and test via a restore.
Also go to their online dashboard and kind of look around, and make sure this is going to be what you want.
But if you wait, just a couple days, you might find that the offer gets a little bit better. And here we have a 35% off link, and they claim it’s good until midnight today—which was the day that they sent it.
Aaah, here we are, more than midnight today, and the 35% discount is still in play there. So, you have to admit, the pricing is very aggressive, very inexpensive, and with this 35% off, it’s even better. Now, the thing about online coupons is that you cannot necessarily guarantee that they are going to stick around.
And here as I tried to leave the page, here’s something else that I don’t necessarily care for; these exit pop-ups, but hmm—it says a live agent has a special 50% discount, just stay on this page.
Now I’m gonna leave anyway because I’m not gonna tie up their time either here, but you can see how something that’s a little bit obnoxious in a way, can actually be turned to your advantage.
So if you’ve maybe been turned off to this particular aspect of MyPCBackup recently, or in the past, maybe you want to take another look.
We do like the service, and we have—we do personally communicate with individuals at the company—and we think that they are stand up people; so at the bottom of this video, or I should say, underneath the video in the description, we’ll have a link to go to our review page.
You can take a look at some of the things we’ve written about MyPCBackup, and you can maybe start another free trial, and it’s only fourteen days, it doesn’t backup much; but if you know you like it, go ahead and sign up, then come back and let us know how you liked it, how everything worked out for you—we’d sure like to hear back!
So that’s it for this short video, we wanted to address that one question we’ve been getting quite a bit of, and we hope that you will find My PC Backup to your liking—or, come to our website and find another backup service that might be more tailored to your needs.
Either way, we hope to see you there! Thanks for watching.
Saving digital memories is a priority for me, especially when it comes to pictures and videos of our children.
We always heard older couples tell us “enjoy them while you can, they grow up so fast”. Boy, they weren’t kidding.
As a parent you don’t realize it until it’s too late. When the kids are young, parenting and earning a living are a lot of work; much of the time you are exhausted.
So you find yourself occasionally sighing when that little grabs a book of the shelf and says “read this to me please?”.
You know the day will come too soon when they prefer to read it themselves or are too big to sit on your lap, but some nights you are just that tired.
As you get older you applaud those times when you took the extra effort to grab the camera and try to capture that latest cute antic.
Digital Photography Changes Everything
I’m old enough to remember when film and developing was expensive. You would take a picture (perhaps with a costly flash bulb) then wait days or weeks to find out if it “came out”.
Then, you would hear stories of a house fire on the news and one thing they always mentioned was how the family lost everything, including family photos.
Thanks to digital photography:
The cost of taking a photo, or re-taking it, is zero (storing it has a miniscule cost)
Duplicates are free
If the photo didn’t “come out”, there is software that might fix it
If you have your phone with you, you probably have a camera (and maybe software to fix the pic, too!)
No wait time for “developing”, or cost either
There is really no reason to ever have to worry about losing your digital memories in fire, flood or other disaster
Storing Your Digital Memories
Most people take their photos off of their camera and store them on their personal computer, often times not even really understanding where the photos are located on the hard drive, just trusting that they are there.
When those digital pictures, and especially videos, get too large for their computer’s hard drive, often a small laptop drive, they transfer them to an inexpensive – prone to failure – external hard drive where storage is exceptionally cheap.
But what then?
Here Is How To Backup Your Digital Memories Online
While some people will backup family digital photos and videos to an external hard drive and store that drive at a family members home or a bank safe deposit box, that is a practice that often succumbs to procrastination and eventually forgotten about.
At best, a backup like that is usually months old, perhaps missing those wedding, vacation or baby pictures that you took recently.
Backing up important digital memories to an online backup service makes a lot more sense because:
The backup happens automatically, daily, perhaps even on an continuous basis, without you having to remember to do it.
Sharing those photos with many online backup services is easier than emailing.
The pics and videos are available for immediate downloading from any computer, anywhere.
Smartphone and tablet access is simple and easy.
Your digital memories are stored securely and protected from most natural disasters; at a location far away from most any calamity that would happen at your home.
It’s a lot easier and more affordable than manually backing up to a disk and driving to the bank with it.
One of the online backup services that we trust our data to is SOS Online Backup. They are one of the top tier vendors who have been in this business for a long time and have built a solid business garnering a superb reputation; and will be around for a long time to come.
I won’t speculate on what may have happened to his computer that caused complete data loss, but I will be happy to let you in on a secret that would have left this gem of a man in a much better mood after he learned the state of his hard drive – a quality online backup service!
A vacation just isn’t a vacation if all you do is worry about what’s going on back home while you are gone.
Lots of things can happen, but thankfully, usually don’t. That does not mean that you should not try to prevent the preventable ones, though.
Do you fear finding any of these undesirable events when you get home from a vacation?
Frozen pipes
Burglary
Fire
Storm damage (like these recent, awful, tornadoes)
Water damage
Computer dead and lost data
While I could give you some advice on the first few, the one I will address here is the dead computer and data loss. While computer backup is the antidote to lost data, via a restore process, it is critical that the backup be not only recent but also complete.
Most online backup services will allow you to backup whatever you want to on your computer and it’s up to you to verify that what is important to you is backed up. We can help with that if you like, just let us know.
What we can also help with, indirectly, is that the computer backup is recent.
In our not so humble opinion formed by decades of working with computer users we have determined that the only backup that is sure to happen on a regular basis is one that is automatic.
How To Stop Worrying So You Can Enjoy Vacation
We don’t expect everyone to go to the extremes we do for computer backup before we leave on a vacation, because maybe we over do it just a bit.
This is what I do before leaving on vacation to protect my data:
Verify that my online backup software is working properly (by checking logs)
Perform a test restore of a file that was backed up to the cloud on a different computer
Put critical data on the laptop that I travel with
Perform a complete backup of my PC to a hard drive that gets put in the bank safe deposit box
What can you learn from this?
The takeaway here is that there are many quality online backup services to choose from, use the reviews on our website to determine which one is right for you.
If you want to sync data between lots of devices, especially if different operating systems (like Mac & PC) then maybe you should look into SugarSync.
If you have LOTS of data and don’t want to get hit with high online data storage usage fees then maybe an unlimited online backup service like MyPCBackup is right for you.
Both of these services are affordable, reliable and easy to use. Protecting your computer data and having those backups off site has never been easier.
If you use Outlook for your email client you will want to know how to backup Outlook files with SugarSync online backup if that is your backup vendor of choice.
The new SugarSync for Outlook Plugin is NOT for backing up Outlook. Rather it is a handy tool for dealing with the sending (sharing) of attachments.
SugarSync does NOT recommend attempting to sync your Outlook data files (.pst, .ost). Note, .ost files are a sync file themselves of the data on an Exchange Server in a corporate environment.
However, you can backup your Outlook information and then sync that data backup file. Some of you may know how to “export” data from Outlook to a .pst file, but that is not what SugarSync directs.
Instead they give instructions to using Microsoft’s Personal Folders Backup tool as a quick and easy way to extract Outlook information. The tool is designed for use in Outlook 2002 through Outlook 2007; don’t know about Outlook 2010.
Here are the instructions on SugarSync’s website. Since it took us a few minutes to find that information on their site, we figured a link here might be convenient.
Essentially you will make a manual backup of your Outlook Data in a folder that you have specified to SugarSync to backup automatically for you. Keep in mind that this is a MANUAL process each and every time! If you don’t perform the backup with the Microsoft Personal Folders Backup Tool, SugarSync will just keep sync’ing the old backup file from whenever!
In our own opinion, untested at this point, is that if you have EXITED Outlook COMPLETELY then there is no reason that SugarSync could not back it up through a normal sync process; but even that would require knowing when the backup was taking place and ensuring you have Outlook closed.
Backup Versus Syncing Data
Actually this highlights a key difference in the way different online backup services operate, or focus. With SugarSync, they want to protect your data in the cloud, but it’s all about syncing with other devices and making your data available from anywhere. They offer Web Archive as a means of just raw backup (data does NOT have to exist on your PC in order to get preserved in the Web Archive).
With other services you will hear them talk about “open file support” and usually make specific mention of Outlook Data Files without having to hunt for it. SugarSync really makes no mention of open files at all. What they do go into is the undesirability of syncing any type of database file, whether it be Outlook, Access, Quicken or QuickBooks.
But you certainly want these files backed up!
We feel that SugarSync is the number one choice for users who put synchronizing data as a top priority. Strictly data backup, however, maybe is better left to another service, maybe MyPCBackup which offers unlimited online storage.
If synchronizing data between different devices, even with different operating systems – like PC and Mac – or you want to stream media to a smartphone or edit a file online, then SugarSync is a FANTASTIC choice.
The Savvy Traveler is always on the go, whether its for business or for pleasure. And you have data that you need to access whenever you get where you are going. You might be in New York one day, and in California the next.
The problem is, you don’t always know what data you will need to bring along with you; and, sometimes you forget to load the data you think you need on your mobile device or USB stick.
And sometimes, well, sometimes technology fails and the USB stick is corrupted – ruining your day along with it.
Whether it’s on a plane, in a taxi, or a hotel room, SugarSync ensures that you will always have instant access to all your documents–wherever they may be. SugarSync allows you to access all their data on the fly. With unique features like automatic online back-up, folder and file sharing, and top notch security features, SugarSync is a must-have for any avid globetrotter – in addition to everyone else, of course!
Remote File Access:
SugarSync not only ensures that your files are backed up and up-to-date, but also allows you to access your personal cloud from wherever you are. SugarSync boasts multiple features that let you stay synced from anywhere in the world.
Access your files from any browser: As long as you have an internet connection, you can get to your SugarSync files. You can retrieve your data from any computer, even if it doesn’t have SugarSync installed. Simply log into your secure SugarSync account from the web to get access to all your files!
Edit files remotely: Even if your computer is offline, you can reach all your synced files because they are stored in your cloud. The next time your computer connects to the Internet, any changes you’ve made will automatically be synced back to the cloud and all your other devices!
Share from anywhere: With SugarSync, you are able to send important files to anyone you want, from wherever you want. Any size and type of file can instantly be shared via any device that you choose!
Mozy Online Backup may have been a little lagging in getting mobile apps out there, especially for Android users, but they are catching up fast.
In fact, the latest update looks – and works – pretty darn well.
And Mozy Stash is making the mobile experience better than ever too.
From the Stash beta, one of the most frequently requested features has to do with the Mozy app. Thankfully, unlike many other tech companies and especially those in the online backup service arena, Mozy listens to their users.
Mozy users have asked the company for the capability to upload files from their mobile device to their Stash.
It’s been possible to upload photos and videos to your Stash for a while, but not other types of files. The latest version of the Mozy app now makes it possible to upload any type of file, so that the file is then available on any of your linked computers.
As you can see from the screen shot on the left, the My Mozy home page on the Android App categorizes your files for easy access.
Yet, if you want to view all of your uploaded files present in Mozy’s cloud storage then just hit the menu button on your phone and select “All Files” and you can drill down like usual.
With frequent updates to the mobile apps and features added that users have requested, I expect that Mozy “gets it” and will continue to improve these programs and add features in short order.
As it is I find the app very useful. The one thing I would like to see is music streaming instead of having to download the entire song first… but patience, I am told, is a virtue.
Ever leave home on travel, whether vacation or work related, and have that sinking feeling that you forgot something?
Not necessarily that you left the stove on, though we have had that thought once or twice!, but that there was something you were going to bring but didn’t?
These days, that “something” is likely to be a document or computer file of some kind that you were either going to work on while at the beach – or so you told yourself – or maybe a critical file for a business presentation.
Once that aircraft lifts off the runway is usually about the time I remember what it is that I forgot.
Online Backup Comes To The Rescue
Thankfully, if you have a good online backup service protecting your data files then you do have access to those important computer files that you wished you had stuck on a USB stick and brought along.
Online backup will automatically backup your computer files to the “cloud” so that you not only don’t need to remember to backup – one of the primary reasons people used to lose data – but it is available to you 24/7/365 from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
Right now, for instance, I am 1200 miles from my primary computing platform. If there is something I need to work on, reference or perhaps send off to someone else that is not on my laptop, then anything that has been uploaded from my normal working PC to the online backup service’s “cloud” servers is available for me to download to my laptop and use.
Avoid That Sinking “I Forgot Something” Feeling
While subscribing to a top online backup service won’t eliminate that “did I leave the stove on” pit from your stomach, it will avoid that “#%$^$^$%, I forgot that spreadsheet I needed to work on” feeling that leaves your stomach on the runway when your plane takes off and it finally dawns on you what you DID forget.
We recently announced that MozyHome users can access this new file sync feature for free! So far we have received great reviews from analysts and the press, which we are very excited about.
Your MozyHome account can take advantage of Stash today. Simply log into your account, click the “Stash Beta” link on the left, follow the prompts, and you’re on your way.
What Is Mozy Stash?
Mozy Stash is a file synchronization feature that complements Mozy online backup and provides Mozy users a simple way to keep their most active data up to date across multiple computers.
It’s also a dedicated space online, so as soon as you place a file in your local Stash folder, it quickly becomes available online as well. No need to wait for a backup or hit an upload button. Start a spreadsheet at work, hit save, and continue working on it at home without needing to transfer the file.
What Do I Get With Mozy Stash?
File Sync
Stash keeps files up to date on every computer you link to your Stash. No more emailing files to yourself. No more USB flash drives. Local versions of your files are copied to each computer that has Mozy Stash installed, in addition to being kept safe and secure online.
Access Anywhere
Even when you’re away from your computer, you still have your Stash. Access it anywhere through Mozy’s app for iOS and Android. You can even access your Stash from a friend’s or colleague’s computer right through the browser.
Instant Upload
Add or update a file in your computer’s Stash folder and it’s automatically updated online as well. It’s automagic!
Peace of mind
And because we’re Mozy, Stash works hand in hand with our online backup. So if you forget to put a file into your Stash folder, no worries! Your next Mozy backup will grab that file and you’ll still have access to it online or via your mobile device.
Any user who signs up for a MozyHome account before April 15th will have access to this feature free of charge. Please note that Stash is not available for those with a MozyHome Unlimited account.
