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Friday 4 April 2014

A simple (free) backup regime

So you've read the NickWorks notes (see http://nickworks.co.uk/faq.aspx) and you want to back up your data to a safe location - not to another disk in the same room, because you know that a fire or a burglary might result in the loss of both. Below is a nice simple set of steps you can take to get free online data. There are other ways, of course, or if you are prepared to pay a few pounds per month there are much neater solutions, but this is a starting point. You get 15GB of data space for free.

1. You need Google Chrome, and if it is not already installed that is the first step. I am assuming you are a Windows user.

2. Set up a Google account. It's best to avoid using any account you already use for anything else, so let's set up a brand new one.

  • Go to http://gmail.com. If you're already logged in, sign out
  • Click Add account, then Create an account
  • Fill in the boxes. In my example, my company is called "spoffin" and the username is "spoffindata". There will be an email account created, spoffindata@gmail.com
  • Birthday and gender can be set to anything, and you don't need to include a phone number.
  • You need to fill in an existing email address, but don't worry, it will not be bombarded with spam.

Below is what it looks like, all filled in:



3. Once this is set up, you will arrive at an email page. Click the symbol that looks like this:

 and select "Drive". This is the web interface to your online documents. Using this is a bit clumsy, as files are converted to a Google format when they are uploaded. But there is an item "Install Drive for your computer" and if you click in this it will install a local interface to Google drive for you.

4. Now you can access your google drive data directly. A dialogue will open which introduces you to Google drive and asks you to log in. A Google drive item will appear in your Documents folder.

4. If you work from this folder your files will be secure. You can copy files into this folder, save them directly there, create subfolders, and generally treat it like a local folder.

5. If you want to share data from several computers, go to gmail.com on each computer, log in with the account created above, and repeat "Install Drive for your computer".