Online Backup for College Students

College has changed considerably since I went, but there are a few things that are not much different. One being that money for spending on anything but essentials is tight so finding that extra cash to buy a subscription to a backup service can be difficult. The reality is thought backing up your data as a student if probably even more important than it is for many people. If you are off to college, university or any kind of secondary education this fall here are some top choices for backing up your data so you don’t lose that 25 page term paper at the last minute and need to start all over the night before it is due.

 

CrashPlan – if you want to save on your backup and can get a few friends together you can use CrashPlan to backup to each others computers instead of spending money to backup to CrashPlan centrals servers. Or you could set it up to backup your college computer to your parents home computer. You might want to keep the files to only include your most important files since you would be using up space on your friends computers but this would easily save you $50 a year on a backup subscription that you could use for something else.

SugarSync – SugarSync offers 5GB of space for free and if you have any kind of mobile device they have some of the best, if not the best, mobile apps available for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry. Once you sign up for the free account you can earn 500MB more for each friend you refer. The best part is they say there is no limit to the number of referrals so in theory you could earn a great deal of free space if you know a lot of people.

SpiderOak – SpiderOak might cost more if you pay for the service, but they have a referral program where you can get up to 50GB of space for free. Of course you would have to refer 50 of your closest friends to get the extra space. If you do have some extra money they offer 50% off the cost of a subscription for people with a valid .edu email address.

MiMedia – Offers 7GB of space for free, one of the more generous amounts of storage available for free. They offer referrals as well but instead of giving you just extra space you can also earn other rewards like cash and gift cards.

iDrive – Offers 5GB for free and you can get an extra 10GB of space for free by referring contacts.

Dropbox – Dropbox will give you 2GB of space for free and you can earn another 8GB by referring others with your link.

If you do have some extra cash to spend on an online backup subscription or perhaps your parents want to get you something to help keep your files safe then take a look at some of these services.

Backblaze – Offers unlimited backup for only $50.00/year and it can be bought as a gift. That is great if your parents want to make sure you use the money to actually backup your computer. Not only that but if your computer gets stolen you can use Backblaze to help get it back using their location feature. Great idea for a college laptop and could be the best $50.00 your parents spend on you.

Crashplan – The family plan is great for backing up multiple computers so your parents computer and your college computer could all be backed up. Great way to sell your parents on it especially if you set it up.

It can be difficult to find the extra money to backup your files as a student but having a hard drive fail or your laptop get stolen with all of your work on it will cost you a lot more in stress and time. The little extra work it takes to setup a decent online backup could save you hours of frustration and headaches.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

3 responses to “Online Backup for College Students”

  1. Sunsetquest Avatar
    Sunsetquest

    Check this out: 50% OFF for students

    http://www.idrive.com/online-backup-education.htm

    This is what I went with after a week of research.

  2. willemijns Avatar
    willemijns

    Idrive Offers 5GB for free and you can get an extra 10GB of space for free by referring contacts.

    extra 50GB max ;)

  3. Rick Bradley Avatar
    Rick Bradley

    SOS Online Backup has a great plan for college students since you can backup up to 5 computers for just $64 per year. Use the sosonlinebackup.com/savings link to get the biggest discount.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Share This