I found my harddrive. Seems it ended up in the Girl’s playdough basket. Um, yeah. But still, ever since I lost it, I realized I needed a NEW backup solution. The external harddrive, while convenient at times, had its limitations. Most obvious — it was a single source. In other words, unless I backed it up constantly, if anything happened to it, I was screwed.
So I found a free solution from Microsoft called LiveMesh. It’s interesting but it covers the needs of a backup, while also allowing the advantages of a portable harddrive.
First, it acts as a sync agent. So it keeps several computers all current (in my case, four different computers in different locations). Second, it stores all these files online — which can be accessed from anywhere with an internet access.
In other words, I alter a file on any of my computers, and it’s automatically updated on the other three, plus online. Files are always current, and available anywhere.
The downside is that if my files become corrupt, they become corrupt EVERYWHERE. So it’ll be important to keep a monthly backup apart from the ‘mesh’. And the size limitation is only 5 Gbs. Which is great for data, but not so much for music. This is still in the beta, so my guess, is when they go live, they’ll offer storage packages.