It is often said that there will come a time when our workstations would fail us. Computers can crash, network systems do fail, and as reliable as you may deem your phone or tablet to be, they too can fail. It is therefore incumbent on us as responsible digital citizens to make every effort now to safeguard our data. After all…prevention is better than cure. Today I would like to briefly look at Google Drive as a simple online service to help you protect your data so that if or when that fatal day comes – you’d be prepared.
Google Drive is a cloud-based storage service that allows you to store your data online and have it easily accessible from your phone, tablet, or desktop computer. For web developers like myself, there are also additional features whereby you can move data from one online platform to another without requiring that data to be downloaded to your local computer . For example, a client’s website can be backed up on the hosting platform and sent for storage in a remote location automatically. More and more web application developers are also including this feature in their software as the benefits are worth reaping. You need not allocate extra space locally to house backups – you can send them to the cloud and keep you local systems uncluttered. The Google drive interface is very user-friendly, secure and offers easy mechanisms for sharing data. It’s also worth mentioning that it is compatible with Microsoft Office. As a significant number of businesses in St. Kitts Nevis use Microsoft Office in their daily operations, this can be a convenient advantage. You can begin for free with 15GB, with paid plans offering 100 GB at $1.99/month. You can read more about Google Drive here: https://www.google.com/drive/
There are several other providers that offer similar clould-based storage for you to backup your data. iDrive and Dropbox are other popular and noteworthy services and worth checking out before you make a commitment. At the end of the day, the key objective is to have that safety net in place in the event a rainy day comes.
