THE DIGITAL CLOSET

Microsoft has doubled the amount of online storage you can get for your phone, tablet, PC or Mac. It’s now 30 gigabytes. To get started, go to onedrive.live.com and choose your device. If you have Windows 8.1, it’s already installed.

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WHEN DISASTER LOOMS

For nearly an entire day, Joy thought she’d lost her most important files. Fortunately, they were backed up in more than one way, even though she wasn’t aware of it at the time.

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BACKING UP AGAIN

When we wrote about online backup from Backup Blaze, we heard from readers who said they couldn’t possibly use an online service. They have too much stuff to back up, like movie and photo collections taking up a terabyte or more. So we turned to “Seagate Central.”

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BACKUP LIKE BLAZES

Automatic backups are nice if your stuff is saved online, where fire, accident and disorganization can’t reach it. For us, it’s a lifesaver. If our file isn’t backed up online, we might never find it again.

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IN SYNC

If you have more than one computer and a phone or two, it’s a good idea to synchronize them. How to do it? Our favorite method is free up to two gigabytes of stuff. Start by installing Dropbox from Dropbox.com to your phones and computers. From then on, everything you drag into your Dropbox folder is synced with your private Dropbox account on the Internet. If you need a file, it’s downloadable from any device. That’s handy. Just now, Joy tried signing into Bob’s Dropbox account on her computer and voila, there were his files. If something should happen to Bob’s computer, she knows she can recover his files on her machine, or even on her phone. The computer doesn’t […]

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FINDING DUPLICATE FILES

“Dupeless 3” is the new version of a small program for getting rid of duplicate files. It’s $8 from PC Magazine’s Utility Library or free for members who pay $20 for a year’s worth of programs. We paid.

Dupeless 3 removes the duplicates and you have some control over the situation. You can search by file name, content, or both. You can limit the types of files, such as photos or documents. Restricting the search is a good idea, otherwise the program shows you too many files that are part of the operating system.

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NO BRAINER BACK-UP

You’d think, being tech columnists and all, that we’ve never had one of those computer disasters where we lose everything. Guess again. One of us has done it several times. (Joy looking sheepish.)

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FLASH DRIVE DUPLICATOR

Flash drives are cheap these days — around $15 for16 gigabytes — which is a lot of storage. We tend to back up everything on them. But what if something goes wrong with that drive and it just doesn’t “flash” anymore, so to speak? We better have it backed up somewhere else. The obvious way to go is to drag and drop files from one drive to another using Windows Explorer, (“File Explorer” in Windows 8). Or you can upload the files to your private storage space on the Internet usingGoogle Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, and any of several other services. But this is slow going if you have a lot of files to copy. A $212 hardware alternative is Startech’s […]

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THE NUMBERS REPORT

Seventy percent of small businesses that have a major data loss go out of business within a year, according to a report by the accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

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GETTING STUFF OFF YOUR PHONE

A friend told us she couldn’t get her photos off her phone and onto her Acer computer, though the transfer worked fine with her other computers. So we told her about the Bump app, but now there’s something new out there that’s even better.

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