There is a Latin proverb that runs something like: A wise man learns from the mistakes of others, a fool from his own. (I don’t know what you’d call people who don’t learn from their own mistakes, probably ‘too-stupid-to-live.’ But I digress.)

The point is, though I have never had a catastrophic loss of data, I have known people who have done and the very idea is terrifying. I used to have three back ups of all of my files on three different external hard drives. My husband thought I was being paranoid. Then his hard drive died.

So now, he uses JustCloud and Dropbox . Dropbox is a bit expensive, so we were considering GoogleDrive, which is incompatible with Linux. Really, Google, really? So, their own employees can’t use it? This set us on a quest to find a cloud storage provider that, you know, worked.

Thank you, Ars Technica :

JustCloud isn’t on that list, but it doesn’t support Linux, either, effyouguys. JustCloud also doesn’t allow you to sync across devices-it’s only as backup for one computer.

More info on those services:

So only Dropbox and SpiderOak work on Linux. This is why I have Dropbox on all of my computers (two Windows, one Linux, which is the main one I use) and my mobile device.

I was ready to completely switch to Google Drive, which is when I discovered the whole incompatible-with-Linux-WTF-Google-uses-Linux thing.

Back to JustCloud. My husband has a licence on his computer to sync up to 250GB to JustCloud and he doesn’t use half of that so he purchased a second licence in order to add my Windows machine. [They charged our card for it but sent no confirmation, so you have to find that yourself, be aware.]

We found the code I needed and installed the software on my Windows machine. I use a 2TB external hard drive as a sort of second (or third) hard drive, and wanted to back up 100GB of that to JustCloud. I went in to choose which folder to sync to the cloud and… was told I’d have to pay an extra $80/year to back up an external hard drive.

Me: B-but I only want to back up 100GB.
JustCloud: That’s fine. You can back up single folders on your computer.
Me: But I don’t want to put it on my computer. I don’t have room for it, there.
JC: Sucks to be you. Thanks for your money, though.

So I’ve had to remove media from my hard drive in order to back up other media, which sort of defeats the purpose of having an external hard drive as a level one back up for the files I’ve had to remove.

At least my most important files are backed up twice… (and I would make out with the creator of Dropbox.)