The most secure solution is to keep a remote backup, and one easy way to do this is a utility such as this offering from F-Secure. Buying the package gives the user a year's subscription to an unlimited amount of online data storage and, aside from the security issue, the other bonus such a system confers is that file replication is a fully automated process.
F-Secure Online Backup is both PC and Mac compatible. Obviously an Internet connection is required to use the program, and broadband which can manage an upload speed of at least 192KB/sec is recommended. Users can specify a bandwidth limit to prevent the package hogging all the connection's resources, although during the initial backup it's a good idea to avoid the limit as it's a slow enough process even going full throttle.
This is because the first backup you run copies everything over wholesale onto the F-Secure servers. From then on, Online Backup merely monitors your files and re-copies any which have been modified, so activity levels are far less intensive and it doesn't make any noticeable intrusion into your machine's resources.
The program can be set to automatically backup various key categories; namely documents, pictures, videos, music, emails and important system files. Alternatively, you can manually mark the exact files and folders you wish to be covered.
Selecting the automatic route, the problem we encountered was that we have numerous games and pieces of software installed on our PC, many of which contain vast slews of tiny GIF icons, garbage text files and so forth. Online Backup dutifully went through and replicated all of these in their entirety, which is understandable, but it meant that during the first backup it took an absolute age to wade through all these pointless, bitty little files. In an hour the program only managed to back up 80MB of data.
We preferred the method of taking some time to initially mark up our important folders manually, and just backing these up. This amounted to 720MB of data, which took 3 hours and 20 minutes to process and upload, at a far more palatable 3.5MB per minute. Obviously speeds will be connection dependent, and for reference we were running an 8MB Max Premium ADSL line that generally gives us upload speeds of 600KB/sec on average.
Copying the files back onto your PC is simply a matter of clicking the restore button. If you delete a file on your machine, it's kept on the F-Secure server for thirty days, so essentially you've got a month's grace to recover anything you accidentally delete (or indeed that your wife / husband / kids / alien-visitors-in-the-middle-of-the-night might delete).
The program can be set to automatically backup various key categories; namely documents, pictures, videos, music, emails and important system files. Alternatively, you can manually mark the exact files and folders you wish to be covered.
Selecting the automatic route, the problem we encountered was that we have numerous games and pieces of software installed on our PC, many of which contain vast slews of tiny GIF icons, garbage text files and so forth. Online Backup dutifully went through and replicated all of these in their entirety, which is understandable, but it meant that during the first backup it took an absolute age to wade through all these pointless, bitty little files. In an hour the program only managed to back up 80MB of data.
We preferred the method of taking some time to initially mark up our important folders manually, and just backing these up. This amounted to 720MB of data, which took 3 hours and 20 minutes to process and upload, at a far more palatable 3.5MB per minute. Obviously speeds will be connection dependent, and for reference we were running an 8MB Max Premium ADSL line that generally gives us upload speeds of 600KB/sec on average.
Copying the files back onto your PC is simply a matter of clicking the restore button. If you delete a file on your machine, it's kept on the F-Secure server for thirty days, so essentially you've got a month's grace to recover anything you accidentally delete (or indeed that your wife / husband / kids / alien-visitors-in-the-middle-of-the-night might delete).
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