I'm a PhD student so back-ups are important. Office just crashed and corrupted a document I was working on. Luckily I was able to retrieve it from a temp file. This got me thinking about backup solutions. I do a nightly backup with Acronis but this won't help if a file I'm working on gets corrupted after working on it for a few hours. I want something that backs up all documents on my desktop but not other files I'm currently working on like videos and apps. Is this possible with current solutions or do I need to put them into a folder to be backed up? I could see this working better if I had multiple desk tops.
OneDrive is integrated in Office 2013. And as a student you ave Office 365 subscription for free waiting for you. That is the latest Office (currently 2013, soon 216) as it comes out, for 5 PCs + 5 Devices (Android, iOS, Windows Phone). You also have 1TB of OneDrive storage. All free. OneDrive allows you to view properly without any issues your documents online. Google tend to break the formatting. Anyway, in addition of this, I would setup, if you are using Windows 8, File History. It does backup of your data on an external data, but it is not just a normal backup. That you have a solution for. What it does, is that it can do 5min (or 10in, 30min, 1h, 2h, etc. as you wish) backup with no system performance loss, by only copying the bytes that has change, and you can go back in time to them. And because it is only the bytes that changes your drive won't full up anytime soon. The only sucky thing about it, is that it doesn't backup your OneDrive folder which is retarded in my opinion, and only backups your personal folders, No ability to pick your own folder. Finger crossed for a change in that in Windows 10, but so far it doesn't look like it.
I did use Dropbox for a long time, but I'm now transitioning to OneDrive (because I have loads of storage there now). I think they are basically rather similar services and work in quite a similar way. As far as I can tell neither do any sort of intelligent backup. Both require you to either move or copy the files and folders you want synced to the dropbox/onedrive folder and only the files there will be synced. You can change the location of your personal folders (desktop, docs etc) to the synced folder though. Right click the folder, go to location tab. As I recall file history in Windows 8 actually still uses libraries to decide what to backup, inspite of them being somewhat devalued after 7. In file history settings (in control panel, not metro) you can pick which libraries it backs up. Add this to the fact you can add locations to/create new libraries and you can make file history backup pretty much any location.
I currently use dropbox for this sort of thing. It provides document versioning which has saved me in the past after something became corrupted on me for some magical reason. It integrates with my android device, is web accessible and the client is cross platform. The initial free space allocated with dropbox is quite small though. So there's probably more capacious offerings.
OneDrive is 15GB out of the box and 30GB if you activate any device for automatic photo backup on the account. And like GoodBytes says, if you have Office365 it's basically unlimited. There are various things you can do to boost DropBox's free storage, but it is starting to look a bit stingy these days.
Agreed. I had dropbox before other services were more common (or at least known to me) and did jumped through those hoops and the resulting space is sufficient for what I want on cloud storage.
One drive is good where it is integrated out of the box (w8, office 2013), but on W7 I find it's client the most crash happy and resource hungry, closely followed buy googledrive and owndrive. Dropbox, IMO, is the most stable and has the best integration (again, on W7). Personally, for versioning, I prefer proper version control software and for backuping-while-working - NAS with timed snapshots. One of the biggest problem with "cloud" services is that you cant access directory as snapshot in time - its fine, if you are dealing with only one machine and couple files, but then it comes to multiple machines modifying multiple files it becomes very ugly, very fast.
What sort of files are you working with? Office documents etc... then OneDrive is great, all integrated etc... But if your working on other files like Video and Sound files then Dropbox will most likely be better. If your worried about the latest version being corrupted somehow then, use a portable drive to backup your latest workings. Copy and drag the folder over, once you know your online copies are OK when you get home/uni etc... overwrite the older files on the portable drive.
I didn't realise I get Office 365 for free as a student. I thought I would still need to pay a yearly subscription. I will look into this tomorrow. I do have a ton of PDF articles but these are easy to back up. It is the word docs that are frequently modified that I'm concerned about.
Do a search of your university name Office 365, you probably have a news article from your school talking about it.
There is always the option to use a more stable word processing software ware. You could even save the formating to after you finish writing. Then save said file as an open doc. Then you could do the formating in any word processor. Word has always been known to crap out on large dissertations. Some Universities even recommend using alternatives for this exact reason. In Germany the standard OS at University is Linux. Sent from Bittech Android app
I don't recommend relying on cloud as a sole backup solution. There's always risk with security and unreliability. I'd recommend considering investing in a NAS (already mentioned), and try to keep 3 independent copies (different media/computers in different rooms if possible) of your files as much as possible, if you really consider the data important. An additional occasional backup at someone's house doesn't hurt either (so called off-site backups). Also, if you value privacy, consider SpyderOak as a cloud storage solution. I know you said that PDF articles aren't important, but if you want to organize them, take a look at Mendeley (works as a citation manager and cloud backup for your articles). Calibre is also an excellent program to manage your digital library (books, brochures, technical manuals, classes notes and resources, etc.)
I have turned on File History and set it to every 15 minutes. I'm running windows 10 and didn't know about this feature. I can't find where I can get office for free as you described I'm only found this Office 365 student £59.99 for 4 years.
I think it's worth noting I'm having no problems using Dropbox and Onedrive at the same time on the same system. They work essentially identically, so it just means you have two cloud synced folders and a bit more net storage to use. Also keeping Dropbox is nice because even though I have plenty of Onedrive storage now I much prefer the quicker and easier way Dropbox allows you to create public links to files.
Dropbox. Best sync, IMO. It works very quickly. I use Onedrive for some things because I've got 25gb free, but dropbox outperforms by miles. You save a change to a document in Onedrive and then sit and wait... and wait... and wait... then fifteen minutes later it finally makes the change on another machine it's synced with. Dropbox takes about 20 seconds.
University of Reading doesn't seem to offer anything but UCL does (5 free installs of Office 365) After office 365 I didn't expect them to be working on an office 2016. Does anyone know the differences? Is it just that 365 is annual and 2016 is a on off cost?
Buying Office 2016 or any Office with a date after it is a one off price for whatever box/download offers indefinitely. Office 365 is a monthly/annual subscription that allows you to use whatever the latest version of Office is plus all the extras included in 365 as long as you keep paying. It's a tricky call to make in my opinion.
Office 365 means is not a version of Office. It is a service name, it is supposed to indicate that it is a "complete" solution for your office needs. Yea, Microsoft marketing. Should not surprise anyone. So Office 365 is free for students, but if you are not, then it is a monthly or yearly subscription (you save by going yearly) as you want, and they have different options for different price point and usage (home or office). If you university is not in, then you go via Microsoft. Some colleges and universities don't want to manage the system, so now Microsoft does! . Office 365 gives you the full suit of the latest version of Office. Right now it is Office 2013. When Office 2016 will be released, you can upgrade all your system to it for free, part of your subscription.
