One of the smartest thing you can do when it comes to your computer or phone is back up.  Although we all know the importance of backing up, few of us actually do it.

And its like something magic to do with the universe. Right when we think we should back up but don’t get time to, is always around the time when something goes wrong just after!

Backing up can get confusing. With so many different backing up solutions available, some paid and some free, its hard to know which is the right one for you. To make it worse when you use some back up solutions, you must use the same software to do the recovery also. And what if that software doesn’t work on your new computer or your going from a PC to a Mac? It can get confusing!

The most popular question we get asked concerning backing up after, which software is the best to use, is should i backup offline or on?

Here I will discuss the pros and cons of both.

Online Storage/Backup

Online backup is in the cloud. That means instead of backing up and storing your data to an external drive like a USB drive, it gets stores in the internet using applications such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

These programs are great, but expensive and slow.

Most people have a lot of data, such as music, documents, movies and pictures. And although backing up to the cloud is very convenient, it will use your internet connection and bandwidth every time you does a backup.

If you don’t have a lot of data allocated to you every month from you Internet Service provider or you use a cheap prepaid wireless service you will most likely very quickly go through all your data. Plus the more storage you use with one of these services, the more it will cost you. You could very well be paying over $100 month to store all your data online with one of these services and maybe even more with your internet service provider.

Saying that, for a lot of people the convenience will certainly make up for it. If you don’t have a lot of data an online storage solution would be perfect.  I use Dropbox when I travel. I put all my important files such as passport information, medicare, flight and insurance into Dropbox and which I also have on my phone, and if I ever get into trouble or loose and documents overseas, I can always go back to my phone to get them.

My biggest concern is with online storage is, what will happen to all my data if one of these services suddenly goes out of business. With the bigger ones this is likely to not happen without a bit of notice, but I wonder about the smaller ones.

Another problem could be, who can and cant see your sensitive data?

Offline Storage/Backup

When people talk about offline backups they are referring to storage not on the internet. Offline backups are to devices like external hard drives, tap back ups, USB drives or optical like CD, DVD or Blu-ray Discs.

Offline backups are certainly a lot cheaper and faster. For $100 you could be able to backup a lot if not all of your data every day and probably not have to spend a cent more. Backing up to an offline disk will not incur any data or any subscription fees.

I backup often to an external hard drive and it usually only takes an hour or so. But, what happens if something goes wrong with my external drive? Unlike a online backup solution where your data is most likely backed up on their end as well incase something happens to your data, the same can’t be said for offline backups… unless you backup your backups.

Also if you back up to an external drive you will not be able to access your data on the run, unless you have a laptop and your back up drive with you all the time.

The perfect solution for me

The perfect solution for everyone will be different.

What I do is backup all my data once a week to an external hard drive. I have two external drives and I alternate them both every week so at very worse case scenario if anything happens to my computer and all my data, and one of my backups die, at the very least I will have data that is only a week old.

For all my very very important data I still back that up to my external drives but I also store them in DropBox. The files are not very big and not media files like music and videos so they are perfect for backing up and storing in the cloud and I can access them very easily using my mobile smartphone.