Easy to use personal backup strategy

All righty then - my daughter will be on her way in a couple of weeks out into the big, wide world, of university life, which means she has to take those first faltering steps towards IT self sufficiency rather than relying on the domestic IT support function (me).

She'll have a Windows 7 laptop and I'm assuming that I'll add an external drive. As she's really not IT literate (in the least), we're going to need something that is really simple to operate and as error-proof as possible.  The two cases we're most concerned about will be where she has a loss or a user error in a time-critical situation (i.e. paper to be submitted by a deadline) and then if she has a loss of the disk.

I think I'd like to engender a culture where she's manually or semi-automatically duplicating things she recognises as important (as she has done at home onto a USB stick) and then have another system working in the background.

Any software recommendations to make life as easy as possible ? Something like Smartware that comes with WD drives or is it Retrospect that comes with EMC drives would seem to do part of job, pretty much using My Documents as the source, but the WD product creates archives that can only be read by WD as far as I can tell, which doesn't seem to help in the situation where you want to quickly transfer to working on a shared 'puter. For that you would seem to do better with a folder syncing solution (I've used Goodsync in the past), which then doesn't have the benefits of version storage to wind back some disastrous "save the wrong version" catastrophe.

I find that with people that don't normally back things up by hand the only method is something that is automatic. Even if you gave your daughter a removable would she use it on a regular basis to back things up? Or would it just collect dust along the top shelf of her dorm room?

What are your options for cloud based backups? What about using a cloud based application system for doing her schoolwork (like google docs or zoho)? 

Also, there are paid services like carbonite and dropbox (which is more sync but still would work).

The key is unattended and backed up someplace other than where the laptop. Sure, having a manual removable drive might work great but what if her dorm room is broken into and robbed? Let's say she loses the computer but not the drive. Can she take that drive down to the campus computer center and plug it in? She probably could but with security the way it is lately and recent stories of comptuers getting infected with pen drives maybe not

An online solution for backup has a couple of key attractions:

-it may only require her to do something she was going to do anyway (connect to the network)

- the data is stored away from the laptop, which deals with that third important case of theft, where all physical devices nearby may get swiped.

Looking at the Carbonite site it looks like a contender as it does look like setup and forget.

My wife uses carbonite and it seems to work real well. Restoring files can take a while though, and the initial backup can take a while depending on how fast her network connection is.

Previously Andy Jones wrote:

Looking at the Carbonite site it looks like a contender as it does look like setup and forget.