As some of you may know I had some hard disk problems recently and lost my MS. Anyway Amazon have 5gb of cloud space free to everyone which is enough for literally hundreds of MSs. Just open an Amazon account f you don't already have one and just one click after every update saves all of your work to the Amazon server. Here is the link if you don't already use it - it's completely free and a hell of a lot safer than physical tech devices http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.htm...cId=1000796931
Dang, I still can't give you reps. Thanks for the link. I have Mac Time Machine but the other day it had a glitch (now fixed) and that was worrisome. I can't imagine losing my novel work. I have it backed up on some flash drives as well, but I don't back it up daily on those.
For everybody's information: erebh specifically asked permission before posting this link. I looked at it, and it's my feeling that he's not attempting to spam the forum. He's just calling members' attention to something that could have saved his manuscript. It's a backup option, nothing more, and it's free, it's not associated with him, and everyone knows the source. I encourage the other moderators to let this post stand. I don't regard it as violating the intention of the no-advertising rule.
no worries GC - handy thing about Amazon's cloud is you can get into it from anywhere, friend's computer, internet café, boss's office and your work is always there!
Never rely on a single backup location (cloud, local drive, etc). Always have several, a couple of local ones (an HDD and a USB memory stick come to mind, as well as the more permanent CD-R) and at least one off-site, for which cloud is useful. I don't currently use a cloud facility, but I'm considering it. It does however need to be treated right. Make sure that whatever you put on it is encrypted locally first (can normally be done with various compression programs that make zip and rar files, etc) then upload it. No cloud service provider can be 100% trusted not to take a peek at what's on their servers to see if they can push advertising at their users.
A good method could be to e-mail yourself a copy of your work. If you have 2 e-mail accounts its even better. The MS will be saved in your sent folders, as well as in your main inbox. BTW, if you still have your hard drive their is always a way to get information off of it. It can be pretty expensive depending on which services you use, but if its something really important to you, and you have the money go for it! I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about companies who actually take your hard drive apart and get the information off of it.
I haven't looked at Amazon's version of Cloud, but I did just check on BT's. (BT is a large provider of telephone/Broadband in the UK.) They, too, offer free Cloud services. But in the fine print, they say that if you don't use it for 6 months, they delete your files and close your account! So BT Cloud not a good option for somebody who wants to just dump a finished MS and leave it for safekeeping! Yikes. I think the best option is MANY options. Without falling into pure paranoia, as many as you can handle. At at the end of it all, nothing beats a good hard copy, stored on your bookshelf. And maybe one or two stored on friends' bookshelves as well ...see what I mean about paranoia!
The thing about cloud storage to be watchful of is privacy. I use a cloud storage system for backup (which has both paid and free versions based on how much storage one needs) and they have one of the strictest policies on who can see your stored information. I didn't look at Amazon's policies, but it's a consideration. And yes, multiple backup systems is definitely a good idea.
