From early on, I learnt the valuable lesson of backups as computers and hard drives do not last forever. Even DVD and CD can degrade over time and with that, the lost of data. So every 3 to 4 years, I would backup a new external hard drive to backup the prior one. For important work files, I would make several backups on thumb drives, SD cards and external hard drives.
There was once when my hard drive of photos which I’ve taken crashed and there goes a chunk of my “experiences”. It was a painful lesson but after that, I really got weary about storage media, they don’t seems to be made to last. Now I have several copies of what I’ve taken and that gave me some peace of mind.
I discovered JustCloud earlier this year. JustCloud is a Cloud based backup system which allows you to practically backup any files on your computer, thumb drives and any USB connected storage and stores them on the cloud. There are many other such services online and some notable ones are Dropbox and Sugarsync. Unlike others, JustCloud offers unlimited cloud storage and whatever you backup to it would remain until you terminate your contract with them. Because it uses the Amazon S3 Cloud system, you be assured that your data would be there no matter what happens.
There are two billing options available and if you pay monthly, it would cost US$9.95/month or if you pay upfront for 24 months, it would cost US$118.80 which works out to be US$4.95/month. The latter option is definitely worth the while.
Apart from the usual sign up, to begin your backup, you would need to download their JustCloud client which works for both Windows and the Mac. All you would need to do is determine which folder you want to backup and it would do the work in the background. By Default, backups are done on a daily basis and if you require hourly backups, there is a paid option for this. They do offer several interesting add-ons such as unlimited versioning (useful if you want to restore previous version of your files) , the option to backup more than one computer and the option to sync files between your computers.
Using the JustCloud client is simple and you probably need to only set it once and it will work seamlessly in the background while you work. When you make changes, only the files which are being changed would be uploaded to the server.
Restoring is simple too, you however can only restore to the same computer you backup from but if you do need to change computer, you just have to contact them with your old computer name and the new one and they would make the modification on their end to allow you to restore to the new computer.
You could even share folders with friends or colleague by using the share option. You could only share folders and not particular files. When you perform the share, you would need to provide the email address of those you want to share that folder with. Once done, they will receive an email to alert them of the share and if they are not already signed up, they can sign up for a free JustCloud account to access the files. They would not be able to write to the folder or make any changes to the files. This will maintain the integrity of your backups.
Syncing is an interesting concept but I’ve not got the chance to do it yet so I cannot comment on it.
It is definitely a very cool service and something I would recommend anyone who needs to backup important files or just want to free up your local hard drive space of files which you have accumulated over the years and do not know what to do with them, something which you may need on a rainy day some time in the foreseeable future.
As with any service, there is always some limitations. As JustCloud requires an internet connection to perform the backup or restoration, the speed would depend on how fast your internet connectivity is. On my 50mbps fibre optic (wired) connection, I average about 20 to 40gb transfer within a 24 hour period. The throughput would depend on your internet connection speed. I wrote to JustCloud and was told that the typical throughput would be between 3-5Mbps.
Although they offer unlimited storage, only files which are under 3gb would be backup. You could vary the file size limits from 1mb to 3gb.
Even with the limitations, JustCloud is definitely something to consider especially if the files you work with is vital to you and losing them is not an option.
They currently do not offer a mobile app to access the data but all files that you have backup can be access from the web browser after you have log in. This will allow you to view pictures and files on your mobile devices on the go.
If you are interested in a cloud backup, do consider JustCloud. They do offer a free trial of their service which allows you to test out their system so you have nothing to lose.
