Has your computer ever crashed? My free online data backup service saved me a lot of time recently. I use a service that gives me 2GB of storage free. I signed up for this service because sometimes all my favorites and bookmarks would mysteriously disappear and it would take me weeks to get them all back, and still I would forget many of them. I thought it would be a good idea to have my favorites and all my outlook messages and settings stored if I ever needed them. It turned out that I was right.

My three year old computer started acting weird. I like to leave mine on all the time, but recently it would just shut down on its own when I left it idle for a while, and I didn't like the idea of spending more money on the machine since I had already installed a new power supply about a year earlier. So I decided it was time for a new computer. I found a new Thinkcentre with XP on ebay and bought it.

Now it was time to prepare for the transfer. I copied files and folders to my portable hard drive, and backed up my outlook messages and bookmarks to my online data backup service. Are you wondering why I didn't just transfer my outlook settings and bookmarks to my hard drive as well? I wasn't sure exactly which files to move and the backup service allows you to choose data sets and transfers the proper files automatically.

When my new computer arrived I shut down the old one and got the new one all set up and ready to go. I installed all the applications I needed and hooked up the portable hard drive and transferred all my important folders and files. All that was left was to download and transfer my outlook settings and bookmarks, but first I decided to try to retrieve the files from my old computer just to see if I could do it.

The old machine would not power up. It is now a month later and it has never worked again. I had a lot of email messages on that computer that I needed, and now the only place I had them stored was on a remote backup system. I went to the web site, logged in and downloaded the necessary backup set to my new computer. Then all I had to do was find the matching folders on my new machine and replace them with the backups and just like that I was back in business. My free online data backup service saved me many hours of work and I will never be without this service again.

For a review of online data backup providers, check out EasyOnlineStorage.com.

Source: www.articlecity.com