A reader has a question about backing up to the cloud:
“We are avid lovers of Windows 7 and would like to know if we can backup our files using the Cloud? I could not find anything on the net about this and thought we would give you a holler. If we can, hopefully, would you please tell us how to do this?”
You certainly can back up Windows 7 files to the cloud. I’ll assume you mean backing up important files like documents and images and not running a full image of your system, though it’s possible to do that to the cloud.
While you can use services like DropBox with Windows 7, the easiest choice is to use OneDrive.
If you have an Outlook, LiveMail, HotMail, or MSN email or your PC is registered with a Microsoft account, you already have a OneDrive Account. If not, you can click here to create one.
The account comes with 5 Free GB of storage. You can purchase more or if you’re an Office 365 subscriber, your subscription comes with 1 TB of storage.
If you’re running Windows 7, you can download the OneDrive app by clicking on the link below.
Follow the setup instructions and OneDrive will appear as an option in File Explorer.
You can set it up to sync files with your PC so items like documents and images are automatically saved to both your PC and the cloud each time you save.
You can click here for an article on how to set up which folders you want to sync.
Google Drive also offers 5GB of free storage while Dropbox offers 2GB. There’s no reason you couldn’t have accounts for with all 3.
I like having that cloud storage backup. If something happened to my PC, my documents would be instantly accessible from another device. If my documents were backed up to an external hard drive and there was a natural disaster of some kind, both my PC and my drive could be lost. I like backing things up twice. Once on an external drive and once in the cloud for safekeeping.