(Sarah is a new ElephantDrive customer, who will be blogging from time to time about her experiences using the software. She, like musical artist Juvenile, is very serious about backing things up, and is glad to have found a company that is just as committed to providing the best in secure online data storage.)
There are times when my relationship with my laptop recalls the poetry that I authored when I was thirteen—it goes through bouts of darkness, followed by dead nothingness. I’ve known for some time now that, rather like my teenage maladies, these periodic crashes were being caused by an overabundance of data sitting on my stuffed-to-the-gills hard drive. The manual solution for this, back in the day, was a journal and a pen. Thankfully, now, a more sophisticated means of backing up my data has arrived in the form of ElephantDrive. Having flirted with the notion of online storage in the past, I was chiefly deterred by the slowness that seemed inherent in the uploading process. Even with a decent connection, downloading something like a simple Quicktime update this evening took long enough for me to make tea, fold laundry, and break another E string on my guitar. Happily, nothing could be further from the case with ElephantDrive thus far. Setup took literally all of a minute, if that, and I am, as I type, backing up the entire contents of my hard drive at a truly impressive rate (along with discovering that there are things on my laptop whose existence I was completely unaware of—how did I end up with an entire album’s worth of Supertramp?). While speed is obviously not necessarily an indicator of security, I have to say that this application is already winning me over with the extreme level of ease that’s been built into its interface—ease and efficiency that frees up a lot more time for me to light a few candles, toss on an old Nirvana cd, and be glad that data storage is one less thing that I have to be angst-y about.
