GeoPlanIT

First up full disclosure: One of my old friends from secondary school has recently started working here. He did not ask me to write this review but I did start using it because I know and trust him.

You probably should backup your stuff somewhere….

Backups, I think everyone reading this will agree are essential if you want to ensure your stuff isn’t lost or damaged by some event, virus or sheer stupidity….   At work we have a system for backing up our data, emails are important but being in control of our data word documents, ArcGIS maps etc.. is essential.  At home it’s a different story it’s not word documents that are important it’s photos and emails.

So I have a solution for photo backups, basically a combination of external hard drive, main PC and Dropbox.   My broadband although not quick can cope with the odd photo or two that I want to share and keep.   It also feels natural to go somewhere take pictures and when home back them up.

Emails are another story, I get a lot, not all are important but it is my life blood at the moment all my life, from receiving that first email from a lady who ended up being my wife to photos of friends, announcements of births, deaths as well as work related emails with important attachments.   Then there are all those online purchases, receipts, serial codes etc!!    Now I really should have a backup of these, Gmail is good but it isn’t perfect and you do hear stories of people who have lost all their emails.

So I have been using an old version of outlook to periodically download all my emails and attachments off gmail and others… trouble is  I less and less use this PC and whole months go by without me using it.   That’s down to me using a work PC during the day and an iPad at home nowadays.

A while back I noticed that one of my old friends had jumped from his then employer Google to a startup called DropMyEmail.  Wow, I thought what the hell is dropmyemail?

Basically DropMyEmail.com is a service that allows you to backup multiple email accounts in one place from a single dashboard. It’s really easy to use and despite a Web Of Trust rating issue (someone seems to have rated it as untrustworthy but is talking about another site), I can assure you it is safe.

It’s quick and easy to setup and can be logged into using twitter, facebook or google accounts, once in you get a free amount of space that you can boost with referrals and the like but 5GB starts at $10 a year which ain’t too bad at all in my book.   You can manage the backups in one place which is great and if you do have multiple accounts the backups can all be searched from here.   Attachments to emails also get their own attachment manager which is very useful and can be used to share them on a number of services.

So why use this service over other methods?   Well for starters if you live in a rural location in the UK and your broadband is poor this could be very useful reassurance. Since it doesn’t rely on you downloading emails to your PC all you have to worry about backing up is your photos, you did do that right?

Not for everyone I admit, esecpially if you have good broadband speeds.    Also if you don’t trust companies to keep your data safe well I’m not going to convince you!   If you’re interested head over to their site and take a look www.dropmysite.com, it’s free for a set amount of data and if you’ve got multiple email accounts like me you’ll be wanting to upgrade pretty soon.

Summary: Email backup service for multiple accounts
Why? If you’ve got poor internet connections but still need backups of your webmail this is for you.
Rating: For me personally I give it a 4/5 it looses points because their sister site for backing up websites (dropmysite) is not integrated with dropmyemail