Which Online Backup Service Is Best? - Comments Page 1

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Backing up / storing data online has become a common practice these days. Internet technology has come a long way ... now you can easily backup your important files to a remote location in the comfort of your office or home.

There are many reviews of online backup companies out there, here is a good site with detailed reviews:
http://www.backupreview.info/category/our-reviews/

This site also has a recommended top 75 online backup companies listed monthly at the left column.

This just goes to show how popular online backup is becoming,however the market is still very much in its infancy with only a tiny fraction of online users using these methods to backup their data,we operate in the business space and have found a far greater takeup in these segments as opposed to the home user markets.

For a free Microsoft service (all it takes is a Windows Live ID from Hotmail, Messenger or Xbox Live) you could try Windows Live SkyDrive. 25GB of free storage.

http: //skydrive.live.com/

And Bob, I know it was probably a typo but I think you meant to say 999,000 instead of "...990,000 who ARE satisfied customers." :-)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Thanks. I should never do math without a calculator. :-)

After a tape backup manufacturer stopped providing driver updates (without notice) after a MS XT upgrade, leaving us with a useless backup system, I switched to Mozy. Unfortunately, after upgrading our server, and after waiting for 1.5+ days for the restore to download, and then several tries at downloading and restoring--the two larger segments from Mozy were defective and unrecoverable. Many years of data files were gone. I say, don't trust any system alone--use at least three means of backing up, and keep at least one physical copy somewhere safe, off site.
My preferred backup is now the Clickfree automatic backup onto a portable HD.

I think I'll just wait for Google's upcoming GDrive, which supposedly will be unlimited and FREE.

Even if it costs, I'd opt for it because I know Google isn't going to go away, plus the service will be tied to my Gmail and other Google accounts.

Well, one slight remark: iDrive DOES have larger than 50Gig accounts. I am currently on a 150 Gig account, business account even goed all the way to 500Gig (pricing: US$ 500).

For what it is worth (it is a lot to me :-) ... iDrive is reasonably priced for a great service. Don't forget the 10-version histories of each file after adaption - iDrive served me well when restoring an old version of a -by then- revised document.

I use PARAGON and eventually isle go to Acronis true image.

Hi,
So far I've been thrilled with Carbonite. I found out about it from kimkomando.com and got a couple of months free when I put in some code. It did several days to get my initial backup done last year. But when you're backing up so many gb of data (especially all the thousands of family photos and videos) just how much faster could anyone expect it go?!

Also, I've never had to use it to restore anything so I can't say how easy it would be.

I hadn't heard that the company lost the backups of 7500 customers. That IS kind of disturbing.

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.

Do any of these systems support linux?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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"

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.

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.

try netcdp for free at http://www.netcdp.com

I've used iDrive for a few months now. Generally it works very well. It backs up in the small hours each night. Occasionally I get an email that it has failed but this may be due to a broadband problem. Having read some concerns about restoring files using Mozy I did a test restore using iDrive and it worked no problem. I do find iDrive Explorer a bit quirky but it is a nice feature.