I had an idea when thinking about making backups of my data– store it online, for free! Just create a Gmail account and email yourself your files. Don’t go sending any whopper files or anything, but you could easily send documents and stuff like that.
You see, I make weekly backups of my blogs xml files. I save the xml files on my computer, but what if my computer were to fail? I would lose all those backups. I could copy them to a flash drive or a CD, but like I said– I make weekly backups, and I have eight blogs! That’s a lot of work. I wonder if I would really backup as regularly if I had to do all that work…
So I thought: Why not email it to myself? Gmail gives you a ton of storage– what is it now, 2 GB? That’s a lot! So I’m going to be emailing my xml files and other files to myself, for Google to store on their servers. And it’s all for free.
Here’s a little caution, though– I don’t recommend that you store sensitive data online like that, such as passwords or medical or financial statements. The chances of your email being hacked ot stolen is pretty slim, but there is a possibility. And email can be opened and read along the way to the server. So it’s still a very good idea to store your sensitive data on a hard copy, like CDs or even print outs.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Actually, gmail makes it very easy to do this–you don’t even have to email yourself stuff, you can just use the gdrive and drag and drop things form your computer into it–thus causing gmail to automatically add it to your inbox. Very handy.