Free Automated Online Backup Solutions

We published an article detailing how to set up automation in PowerChurch Plus, using the Windows Task Scheduler. As an addendum to that article, we are now going to explain how to use free cloud backup & sync services to copy those automated backups offsite for safe storage.

There are many free services of this type, most notably Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive. You install an application that watches for new or updated files in a particular folder on your computer and automatically copies, or syncs, those files to the cloud. Free accounts usually include around 2GB of storage. For context, PowerChurch backups are usually very small in size, allowing you to store hundreds or thousands of backups in one of those free accounts. In this example, we will be using Dropbox, but the process should be very similar across any of these services.

In PowerChurch Plus, go to File > Preferences > System Setup Options. Click on the Backup tab, then click the Choose Folder button to browse to the folder that is synced with the cloud service.



In the example above, we created a new folder called PCBACKUPS to keep the PowerChurch backups separate from any other files that may be synced.

That's all there is to it! The scheduled backups will automatically be created in the location you specify (\Documents\Dropbox\PCBACKUPS). The installed sync application (in this example, Dropbox) will then automatically copy the new backup offsite.