Rudy: The external drive is only used for desktop backups, but recently has been giving occasional error messages. It was supplied up with an inbuilt WD proprietary program, the sole material benefit of which seems to be to give password protection for the drive. Am not sure if it's that prog which is at fault, in which case I could obviously reformat the whole disk without password protection. But I suspect that the drive is just on its way out. Although I've been using it for way over a year, comments on other forums (e.g. Amazon) do not appear to rate the drive highly. Naturally I don't want to wait until it finally packs up.
Posts elsewhere indicate that sugarsync is quite specific about what file types it can accept, apparently not the two suffixes I mentioned. That leads me to wonder if the other clouds you mention are too?
Now looks to me as if I need to set up desktop backup on my wife's laptop, and vice versa. But what's the best way? File sharing wouldn't be an issue.
Okay, you don't have the problems I encountered when using external hard disks.
After I had reinstalled Windows on my PC, I suddenly got messages that I couldn't move, or delete, files because I had no access to them, even when my user account was still setup in the same way.
I fixed all my external hard disk problems by formatting them to exFat. This is a system that works cross platform and doesn't add specific Windows clearance to the files. So, I can use my external Hard Disks on all my PC's and never run into access troubles because it doesn't recognize the user on that system.
I was thinking maybe you had run into this problem as well.
I have to say, I have external had disks in use from different brands, some of them I'm already using for 3 years or more and one of them, attached to my laptop, is active every day.
I don't save any documents to my laptop, I only have my OS and programs on that drive, and my external hard disk is only used for hold my data and my backup image from my laptop. So, it's working like hell for me.
You sometimes have to have a little but of luck with these things. I had a HD die on me after 6 months, and I still have an old IDE hard disk in a machine in the attic that's now almost 10 years old.
And like jimbo45 says, backup through cloud is almost not done, or you need to have a very fast connection to an external datacenter. Else, it takes hours and hours to get it uploaded.