All you need is Sugar Sync. It automatically syncs up with what you are doing on your laptop as long as it is connected to the internet. And most college campus have wifi everywhere.
I helped set up a few relatives in college with it. They get the paying editions for about $50/year. They have free editions which keep 5Gb in “the cloud” for you or a student
There are other services like Sugar Sync.
Say the student is typing a paper into MS Word. Every time he presses save button (or control+S) he is saving what he has done thus far onto his hard drive AND onto “the cloud” with Sugar Sync
This student with stolen laptop could have survived with the free 5GB edition I am sure. The paper he worked on for years could not have been more than 10-100mb depending on how much graphics
His laptop that got stolen goes for good money on ebay. If this was his life’s work he should have backed it up on an external hard drive....less than $70 these days. Got one for a college student. He never used it but he did use Sugar Sync so if his laptop was stolen or hard drive crashed all his important work was backed up in “the cloud”
Even a novice can see the problem with putting your backup “in the cloud”. As long as it is nothing you care anything about, you are OK.
A server somewhere in India or China may not be the safest place to store your data, even if “encrypted”.