Free Backup

We’ve all heard sometime that “there’s no such thing as a free meal”, which is absolutely right and also applies to backups. Sure, we can find free backup software and even use our own hard drive to store such backups (although that is not the smartest thing to do) which can give us a “free” sensation. However there will always be direct and indirect costs associated with backups. For an instance, you own an external hard drive and get some free backup utilities, however that external hard drive will die sooner or later and when it dies, you’ll have to divide the original cost between the number of months that it lasted and that way you can know how much it actually cost per month.

But let’s get into an ideal scenario, where one of your beloved relatives gives you a nice external drive for your birthday, so it didn’t cost you a penny. You get some freeware or open source backup software or even better, use the one that comes with your operating system. You can do free backups in no time this way.

Another way to get free backups is to sign up with an online backup provider that offers free accounts, there are several of them that will give you a small (usually around 2 Gb) account free of charge. You’ll have to gracefully receive all their marketing emails inviting to upgrade your account to a paid one but if you get a few accounts with several providers, you might be able to backup well over 20 gb for free. However, keep in mind that there’s no legal obligation for the provider to keep account active, they may (and will in the long term) deactivate your account and permanently delete your backups. They will do so because free accounts are provided so that potential customers can try the service and start to love it, to upgrade later to a paid account. There’s no profit for them in free accounts, however they have costs that the provider absorbs on a monthly basis.

The last way I can think of to have free backups would be to get a small application called Gdrive, which will use Gmail’s huge space allotments to use them as an online storage account. This might not be the best way to do backups as it’s slow, but you can always link more than one Gmail accounts and get huge amounts of space.