Cloud options

The last few months have been a time when I've been aiming to get better backup online - on Cloud. I'd used Dropbox before, at my last job, but found that when my son sent a whole pile of photos through on it, the office internal backup system decided it needed to back all these up as well.  Perhaps there was some issue with the way it was set up.  Anyway I was bit loathe to use it again, but decided that there was sufficient free gigs to use it for some of my stuff, and so I did.  

I don't particularly like the way you have to back up stuff manually yourself, but it works well enough.  

I also discovered that I could get a certain number of gigs free on SugarSync.  This is a better system in the sense that any changes you make to the folders you've specified to be backed up are backed up automatically. However, you have to specify the folders, and if you decide to go and add another folder  that's not on the list, you're up for a manual job again.  Still SugarSync was a step up.  

So far at least both of these were secure data backup systems, which was a plus.  And then I came across JustCloud, which again offered so much free backup.  The only problem with them was that they assessed how much room you'd need to backup things and then expected you to pay for that space.  Well, at this point I decided, what the heck.  I've got the money on PayPal, which they were willing to take, so I went for a two-year plan and got some huge number of gigs in terms of space.  At this point I'm using less than 10% of it, and all my photos are backed up (it took a couple of days!), and all documents, and music files from Sibelius and some other odds and ends.  However they don't backup some other things - the wav files from my concerts, for instance, didn't go automatically.  I'll have to investigate what the story is there.  

So at this point I have three places backing up either some or most of the items that are on this computer.  There are two external hard drives as well around the place that have everything on them - except that because they're not connected to the computer all the time, they don't have the more recent stuff.  It's a bit of a hit and miss thing, this backing-up.  You do your best, but you can bet your boots something you wanted to keep will just vanish in the process!