As a new mom, I am constantly taking photos and videos of my baby. How could you not? Everything she does, or even when she's not doing anything, it's the cutest thing in the whole wide world. So, I upgraded my phone to iPhone 5S 64 GB, but can you believe that I am constantly running out of space? I dread getting that "Cannot Take Photo - There is not enough available storage to take a photo. You can manage your storage in Settings." message.
Because I don't like to delete all of my photos and videos every time I download them to the external hard drive, I have to go into my Camera Roll nearly every week to delete some of my old photos and videos to make room for the new ones. It's pretty ridiculous, I know. It has been working for me thus far, but recently, I accidentally deleted some videos I thought I already downloaded, but hadn't. Can you imagine how bummed I was when I realized that I just deleted some of her first-moments before downloading them first? I then scoured the interwebs to see if I can recover those lost videos, but didn't find anything that seemed to work. Long story short, I needed a backup solution.
I was that perfect use case for someone, who didn't care about system restore or backup, but rather, all I wanted was the ability to backup my important documents, photos and videos automatically. Sure, I use Dropbox and Google Drive, but both of those have a hefty annual price for the type of storage I need. Dropbox starts off at $99/year for 100 GB, but it goes all the way up to $499/year if you want 500 GB of storage. For Google Drive, it's nearly as much, $59.88/year for 100 GB and $239.88/year for 400 GB and I would rather upload files to my external hard drive manually. Pogoplug, on the other hand, is another solution I wrote about in the past, where you can turn your own external hard drive into its own cloud storage solution, and that's one way to go about it. I've always been a fan of Pogoplug and they now have their own cloud solution as well, so I was excited to learn that Nero and Pogoplug have teamed up to create what is known as Nero BackItUp 2014.
For those of you, who've used Nero's BackItUp solution before, you would know that they used to focus on the system restore, but that's no longer the case with this brand new Nero BackItUp 2014 version. While you can still do a system restore, if you'd like, this is an entirely new product that allows you to simply backup your most wanted files without the hassle. In addition, if you take advantage of their Unlimited Storage option, you can backup up to 5 PCs and unlimited number of tablets and devices into the cloud - without the storage limitations. They normally offer this package at $69.99/year, but for this week only, you can get this deal for just $39.99/year. I haven't seen any other unlimited cloud storage options at this price point and it's definitely worth trying out.
Aside from the backup of your files, there are other notable features like the share functionality that allows you to easily share your files with friends and the ability to access them wherever you go. So, not only do you have a backup of your files in the cloud, you can also access them from the cloud whenever you want. For me, that means that I no longer have to hoard all my photos and videos on my iPhone just to be able to access them whenever I want because I can now access them via the cloud.
So, how do you get started? In just three simple steps, you can safely backup all of your data from your PC, tablet, Android and/or iOS devices. First, you choose the data you want to back up.
Nero BackItUp 2014 - Step 1
(Credit: Catherine Preisler)
Second, you choose where you want your data backed up: local drive, external drive, optical drive, network, and online storage. As you hover over each of the five options, it also explains how your files are protected and why the protection is set at a specific level.
