Smart Tech Tips

What would happen if your house got washed away by Hurricane Katrina II? The nice backups you made of your data would probably be gone from the fire safe along with the computer near your desk. This is why offsite backup is important in our digital age. In the not so distant pass, such services were expensive for a few megabytes of storage.  Today, Google’s gmail and sites such as box.net will give you gigabytes for free to store your data on their machine. Brushing aside your paranoia of having your data somewhere else, this is great opportunity to sigh up and create a habit of uploading your data to a different location. To be safe, encrypt your data with WinRAR or Winzip BEFORE you transfer it. Here are some steps to creating a folder on your local machine that accesses box.net’s computer. If executed correctly, this folder looks as though it resides on your computer and give you the ability to drag and drop files as such.

1. Open a box.net account
2. in explorer folder view, right click on ‘my network places’
3. choose ‘map network drive…’
4. click on link ’sign up for online storage…’
5. follow the wizard and put in ‘https://www.box.net/dav‘
   in the ‘internet address:’ field
6. you will be prompted for user name and password
7. finish up the rest of the wizard and you’re done

Copy your newly created ‘network’ icon to your desktop and just double click to open and use as any folder that’s on your computer. If you reboot, or from time to time, it may ask you for your username and password. This method is also a great way to share files between work and home machines or laptops!