CloudHQ Backup and Sync

CloudHQ Backup and Sync

Let me be completely honest up front, I’m writing this with the hopes of having my access to the CloudHQ backup service extended, so with luck I may benefit from this article. On the flip side of that, I’d hardly be writing an article praising a service, with the hopes of having further access, if it wasn’t a service worth doing that for, now would I?

In the past, I’ve fallen victim to computer crashes, hacks, and other assorted misadventures and malfeasances due to assorted misfortunes and miscreants. This has made me very cautious when it comes to protecting my data. Some would say I’m paranoid. They’re right.

Like many others, I use my Gmail as the hub of both my personal and professional life. It has everything in it – contacts, contracts, birthdays, renewal dates, everything. The loss of it would be catastrophic. Devastating. Bad.

I’ve tried many different services to ensure the safety of my Gmail data, both desktop and cloud-based. Nothing quite measured up. Logins expired. Connections dropped and wouldn’t reconnect. It required manual intervention, and my memory isn’t stellar at the best of times, so you can imagine how well those solutions fared.

I was beginning to despair at ever finding something that was both easy and functional. I could find solutions that were either one or the other, but nothing offered both. The useful ones were ridiculously complicated, and the easy ones didn’t work.

Then I discovered CloudHQ Backup and Sync.

At first I was skeptical. It was easy. According to my experienced dichotomy, that meant it wouldn’t work. Oh well, it was free and I was bored, so it was worth a try. I used it to connect my Gmail to my Dropbox to keep a running sync of the former to the latter. Then I sat back and waited.

The free account can’t be described as speedy, so I waited for the better part of a week to hear back on what it had been up to. (I have 13 GB of data in my Gmail, after all.)

I was blown away by what it had accomplished. The folder in my Dropbox was divided by years, each year divided by months, each month divided by days, and in the folder for each day was every single email as both an email and a PDF file. Every. Single. Email.

Wow.

Okay, so far, so good. The initial sync had worked beyond my wildest hopes.

Next step: ongoing sync.

I checked it daily for awhile to confirm that it was, indeed, syncing. Not only was it syncing, but it was syncing in real time. I actually got to watch it download an email and create a PDF for it. SO COOL!

CloudHQ does a whole lot of other things besides cloud backup and syncing, but for me, that alone is a lifesaver. I recommend it wholeheartedly as a solution to keep cloud data safe and synced. Next time I’m bored, I think I’ll see what else it can do.

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