Still loading your documents onto a flash drive and trotting your aching Prada knockoffs down 42 flights, across the lobby to a different elevator bank, up 15 flights and across the floor to your colleague because the company email and collab site has a size limit…a mini, skinny, obnoxiously small limit?
You need an unlimited online data storage service. The one I use is Mozy. Another reputable site is Elephant Drive. Mozy has more bells and whistles and is well reviewed everywhere, but if you have a make and want to do automated backups, go with Elephant Drive. You can upload your document to a secure site, give your colleague a password, and he can download the entire document – no fuss.
When I’ve used this:
- Working from home: I needed to get a document to my manager who was in another country.
- The email security software stripped the images out of my document.
- My colleague was across the country and I’d left a big pile of hair on the floor trying to find a way to share a huge document.
- Sending a document to a small business owner with a small limit on the size of her emails.
- Sending a document to a colleague on vacation whose email was filling up fast – I just sent her a note on where to find it.
- Sharing with several colleagues. This keeps multiple copies of large documents off the often over-stressed company mail servers.
- Working out of the office with no access to my drive – but there it is on Mozy, accessible from anywhere (yea!).
What Can You Absolutely Not Afford to Lose?
I assume you already back up…but what if the house burns down? Seriously. Houses do. No, really…they do. Or what if, like me, your computer dies and then you discover that the backup drive was only pretending to work?
For less than a couple of lattes each month, you can have unlimited off site storage in a safe, secure data vault. My recommendation is to either upload only that which is truly important to you, or schedule it to backup while you sleep. Big uploads to the web are slow, but a couple of gigabytes here and there are a breeze. Some of the things I’ve stashed offsite:
- Financial records
- Household inventory (see above…in case the house burns down)
- Photos
- Music
What would you save?
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