I think online backups are great, they are convenient, can be scheduled or automatic and provide off-site protection. The downside to online backups is they can take longer to restore. For that reason it is still important to have local backups. A restore from a local backup will always be faster than an online service. It is also a good idea to not rely on just one backup so having a local backup on an extra hard drive, an external hard drive or another computer is always a good idea. Until recently I have not found a backup utility to combine both. IDrive recently released the new IDrive Portable.
The IDrive Portable is backup software that IDrive is selling combined with a a nice 320gb size external hard drive. If you already have an external hard drive though you might not want to buy the one that IDrive is selling. Good news, you don’t have too! You can download the IDrive Portable software, copy it to your external hard drive and install it from there.
I did not have a spare external hard drive lying around, so I grabbed one of the many 1gb USB flash drives I have lying around and gave it a try. It was pretty easy. Just copy the software to the USB flash drive, double click to install and before I knew it I had a local backup of my files on my 1gb USB flash drive.
Here is a quick video of me installing it on the USB flash drive.
IDrive Portable is a great idea. Combine an external hard drive and software that will manage both a local backup and an online backup. The current version only works with Windows, but the FAQ states that the external hard drive should work with Macs as well, but you would have to use Time Machine with it.
Hopefully we will see other online backup services starting to offer similar features in their software clients.
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