Which Online Backup Service Is Best?
If you listen to talk radio, you've probably heard online backup services like Carbonite, Mozy and iDrive advertising incessantly. Let's take a look at each of them, to see what they offer...
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Online Backup Services
Online backup services help you create an off-site backup copy of your important files. This is a valuable tool in that you have a way to recover data if your hard drive crashes, if you accidentally delete a file, if you experience a disaster in your office such as a fire or flood, or if your computer is stolen. While on-site backup devices are practical they too can be lost, damaged or destroyed in a fire, a power surge or if your office is burglarized. In these situations having an off-site backup can mean the difference between spending a couple of minutes to restore your files or spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours to recreate files.
- Carbonite is the most popular online backup service, with an estimated 2 million customers. It offers a free trial to check out its services before you subscribe. If you sign up for a paid account then the fee is $54.95 a year, which works out to be about $4.58 per month. It is easy to download, install and set up. However, according to customer reviews of this service the initial backup of your files can take days to complete, depending on how much you have to back up. This product is compatible with both Macs and PCs, it doesn’t have a limit on how much you can back up for your $4.58 per month, it automatically sets up your account to back up the most common file types, i.e. documents and settings, however, if you have video, image or music files that you would like to back up then you will need to add these manually.
If you scan the online forums, there are some people who have complained about Carbonite’s limitations related to user control over what is being backed up, how it is backed up and how long it takes to backup. And in March 2009, Carbonite revealed that they had lost the backups of 7500 customers, but blamed the problem on defective hard drives supplied by one of their vendors.
- Mozy is another well known online backup service. It offers a free 2GB personal use account and a $4.95 per month unlimited storage account option. This online backup/storage service is compatible with both Macs and PCs. What people seem to like about Mozy is that it is easy to use and that its security is top notch. It utilizes both a 128 bit SSL encryption program and a 448 bit Blowfish encryption program. Other popular features offered by Mozy include automatic backups, easy to access files, remote access to your backed up files and incremental backups that look for new and changed files for backing up.
A few negative remarks have been made about the poor performance Mozy has with extra large backups. If you utilize the unlimited backup account option then you need to be prepared for your initial backup to take several weeks to complete. Also be prepared for serious delays when it comes to restoring large files and programs.
- iDrive rounds out the Big Three for online backup services. Like Mozy, it offers a free 2 GB backup account to home users. If you need more storage than that, or if you are in need of business file backup then you can select from one of their fee based accounts. You can get a 50 GB personal use account for about $49 a year, or a 50 GB business account for $99 per year.
iDrive does offer some unique features, such as iDrive Explorer, which maps out your backed up files like Windows Explorer, and has true archiving/synch options. That means iDrive doesn't automatically delete files on the server side when you delete them from your computer. iDrive also has mapped drive support, so you can backup multiple computers on your home or office network. The only drawbacks I could find from a customer perspective were the 50GB limitation, and that the interface is a bit more complicated to use.
Choosing an Online Backup Service
On the surface, each of these online backup services are similar. You pay about $50 per year, and you get convenient offsite backup for your important files. Carbonite gets points from users for ease of use, but Mozy seems to be preferred by techies, who like the more advanced controls that it offers when creating and scheduling backups. iDrive has some features that might be compelling to certain users. And of course there are others, such as Dropbox, Omnidrive, Norton Online Backup and Apple's MobileMe.
So which is best? You could poke around in the user forums to see what people are saying about each of them. And sometimes that's a good way to get a sense of which is best for you. But keep in mind that any service that's used by millions of people will have its detractors. I call this Big Company Syndrome. If a company has a million customers, and just one tenth of one percent are very dissatisfied with the product, that's 1000 unhappy people. And of course they are more likely to make noise than the 999,000 who ARE satisfied customers. So don't form your opinion of a company or it's products solely upon negative comments posted online.
Here's what I recommend... Check out all three online backup services, then pick one and go for the free trial. If the service meets your needs, $5 a month for automatic offsite backups is not a bad deal. Do you use an online backup service? Post your comments and questions below...
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Posted by Bob Rankin on September 4, 2009 05:22 PM
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Article information: AskBobRankin -- Which Online Backup Service Is Best? (Posted: September 4, 2009 05:22 PM)
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Copyright © 2005 - Bob Rankin - All Rights Reserved
Most recent comments on "Which Online Backup Service Is Best?"
(See all 19 comments for this article.)Posted by:
ClayeRod
09 Sep 2009
I am trying to catch up with the present time and I'm still in the past, but I must say thanks to you and your site i'm moving a bit faster, thank you.
I'm just learning about Carbonite from a tv commercial and now you, thanks.
I learned from one of the other people who have posted comments that google was coming out with the g-drive, must find more info.
Posted by:
James
09 Sep 2009
Do any of these systems support linux?
Posted by:
Sherman
09 Sep 2009
There are many backup services out there and easy to use but the question is how secure these sites are. And how do I know that my backup stuff are not seen or used by even the same site which offers this service? These days it's hard to trust anyone! I think, the best solution for ordinary people to backup their files like photos and videos etc. is to have an external hard drive and keep it somewhere safe for a disaster day.
Posted by:
Tom
09 Sep 2009
At LEAST 2 forms of backup one of which is off site like these on-line options. For most users I expect incremental versions probably aren't necessary - but it is really nice to have that option. If the service encrypts the files in backup, you should be secure - but again - how do we know the encryption is real?
Hey Bob - is there a way to verify the software really does encrypt your files?
EDITOR'S NOTE: My perspective is that it would be harder to provide FAKE encryption than the real thing. And why would they risk it?
Posted by:
Robert Haines
10 Sep 2009
Hi Bob, The storage limit for IDrive Online Backup for Personal Use is 150GB, not 50GB. We also offer IDrive Pro for Business plans up to 500GB. Please make that one correction. Otherwise, great blog. Thanks for sharing our key differentiators such as IDrive Explorer, True Archiving, Mapped Drive Support, etc. Also, one thing you didn't mention is that IDrive does backups/restores much faster than the competition.
IDrive Pricing: http://www.idrive.com/pricing.htm
--
Best Regards,
Robert Haines
Business Development Manager
IDrive Online Backup
EDITOR'S NOTE: Sorry for the confusion. I was looking at the Business pricing, which is 50 GB at $99/year. Why do Business users get 1/3 the storage for twice the price?
Posted by:
Bobbi Spofford
11 Sep 2009
I've used Carbonite for a few years and have been very impressed It did take a couple of days to complete the original back up, but most of the files were photos so we expected that. A year ago we had a hard drive crash and lost everything on a PC. Carbonite restored everything in under 12 hours. Really can't ask for more than that.
Posted by:
Dave
13 Sep 2009
I contacted Kim Komando (kimkomando.com) about the Carbonite issue (she recommends the site and also advertises it). She forwarded my note to CEO of Carbonite. He said out of 7500 users they were able to get back data for all but 54 users. Here's his response: "Dave,
Kim Komando forwarded me your email concerning the Globe story on Carbonite losing customer data. Unfortunately the Globe mangled this story. Here’s what I posted on my blog at the time.
The total number of Carbonite customers who lost any files was 54, not 7,500.
Here is what happened: The Promise servers that we were purchasing in 2006 use RAID technology to spread data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don't lose any data. The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as "firmware" in the storage servers. In this case, the Promise firmware had bugs that caused one of our hundreds of servers to crash. All 7500 customers on the defective server were affected. Carbonite, with considerable effort, was able to recover more than 99.5% of the files within a few days, but 54 customers lost some files. We took full responsibility for what happened and I did my best to call each of these customers personally to apologize.
As a result of our problems with the Promise servers, we switched to a popular Dell server that uses RAID6 – an improved RAID that allows for the loss of 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously before you lose any data. This configuration is 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive — the chances of 3 out of 15 drives failing at the same time are almost nil.
After two years of getting nowhere with Promise, we sued Promise over this incident, and we are now close to settling the matter. In the lawsuit we stressed the fact that 7500 customers lost data. We did not stress (for obvious reasons) that we got nearly all of it back. Unfortunately the Globe never bothered to call us to get the complete story, and the story was widely picked up on the blogs. In fact, not one writer ever bothered to call us to get the whole story. Truly amazing to me.
Dave, we’ve had a perfect record in the two years since this incident. If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Dave Friend"
Posted by:
Bev Weidmann
21 Oct 2009
I love Mozy and have been using it for about 6 months. I tried Carbonite first but Carbonite doesn't back up files from external hard drives. Mozy does. They are both slow for the initial backups but Mozy didn't drag on my computer like Carbonite did. I recently reformatted my hard drive and opted to purchase my back from Mozy ($120 for 86 GB) so that I could reorganize more easily. It worked well and was cheaper than paying a service for recovering a crashed hard drive.
Posted by:
James_Carr
28 Oct 2009
For online backup I would recommend backupandshare.com to all home users, it is a great service for personal use or people looking for inexpensive online backup. It is very simple to use with features like incremental automatic and scheduled backup. It is a secured, easy-to-use online backup service that automatically keeps files and digital assets safe and easily accessible.
Posted by:
alex
19 Nov 2009
try netcdp for free at http://www.netcdp.com