Backups are an essential part of any website. Most hosting companies will offer backups with their services, but you shouldn’t rely only on the automated backups they offer. I can tell you first-hand that the cPanel automated backups are not 100% reliable. I ran into a problem once where they just stopped running altogether but I didn’t notice.

The only real drawback to saving your backups to your own computer is that you don’t have it anywhere else, and creating a backup disk each day is tedious. And with my personal computer getting older, I’m a little worried about losing my digital photos and all my past work. I keep everything.

This is where keeping an online backup is handy. But you can’t simply pick any website to upload your files to. IDrive is an online backup service that encrypts your files for added protection. They offer up to 2GB completely free. If that’s not quite enough, like 5 years worth of photos, they have a 50GB storage package for $50 per year.

The features on both packages are amazing. They have a ‘continuous backup’ feature which will allow you to automatically back up your (updated) files every 10 minutes. You simply download it, install it, and you’re ready to go. Or if you want to make a manual backup you simple drag and drop it in like you would moving files from folder to folder on your hard drive. Then you have the detailed statistics you can refer back to if necessary.

I’ve just set up my account today, I’ll update you later on how it goes.