Online Backup Services

The name is self descriptive and this hub is going to review some of the best known online backup services and sites.

- Mozy

- Carbonite

- IDrive

You may want to also visit my related hubs on shareware and freeware backup software and the Windows integrated backup facility or my site on Data Storage Solutions.

Mozy Backup

Mozy offers an online backup service with an attractive price\space ratio : you can back up as much as you want for only $4.95 per month. That’s right. You have unlimited storage space. You can store everything on your hard drive or drives, hundreds of megabytes even, for a fairly low fee. If $4.95 is too much for you, you can even get 2 Gb of storage space entirely for free.

To use Mozy, you download a custom application which allows you to set the files you want to back up, arrange a backup schedule, choose from a wide range of preference options, and, once you’re done with all that, actually transfers your files across to the Mozy servers. The application is super slick and very impressive, and the range of options it offers would be hard to surpass. You can control CPU usage, arranging for Mozy to do backups only when CPU resources are operating at below 60% utilization rate, for example, throttle bandwidth when files are being transferred, and exert control over a number of other features.

Actual backups are very easy to set up. The software scans your PC and offers you a number of checkboxes such as “Thunderbird Contacts” or “Firefox Favourites”. You can tick any of these to have them included in the backup job or, if you prefer, select files or folders manually.

Once your files have been transferred across, you can access them through a Mozy virtual drive which shows up in your My Computer tray. You can click on it just as you would a hard drive on your computer, clicking to navigate around its folder structure and either accessing files directly from there or restoring them to your own computer through a right-click menu option.

If I could quibble with the Mozy interface, it might be nice to have more file filter options, such as the ability to include all Microsoft Word files from a directory in a backup job rather than having to either select all the files in a folder or individually pick them out. It should also be noted that Mozy only maintains its online backups for as long as you maintain the corresponding files and folders on your PC. So, if you were planning to offload 10 gigabytes of mp3s you’ve downloaded as a way to free up space on your hard drive, Mozy isn’t the solution.

There’s no doubt that Mozy is extremely impressive software\service combo with a price per gigabyte ratio that’s hard to beat. If you’re at all interested in online backup options, you would be well advised to check it out.

Carbonite:

Unlike a few of the other online backup services, Carbonite doesn’t offer any free service. It does offer a 15-day trial so you can see whether it’s all to your taste or not but, after that, you’ll need to stump up some cash. Its prices do compares favourably to the commercial services of the other providers, though. For example, it offers unlimited storage for $49.99 per year. This is only marginally more expensive than Mozy Backup.

Carbonite’s user interface is rather minimalistic, which might be a boon for inexperienced users. Essentially, Carbonite integrates itself with the operating system’s own UI, allowing you to right-click on a file or folder to have Carbonite back it up. Blue dots will appear in Windows Explorer alongside any files or folders you’ve added to Carbonite’s backup fileset, just in case you forgot. While simple, this approach does sacrifice some of the utility offered by other backup software which contains options for backing up special sets of files, such as ICQ data, Firefox bookmarks and so forth. Carbonite does support backup of the Desktop, My Documents and email. Nonetheless, special file support is more limited than in some of its competitor products.

Although its core operations can be performed without a real user interface, there is an HTML-based UI used for setting preferences. These are more limited than in some of the competing services, but some may see this is a welcome avoidance of needless complexity. Carbonite does appear to be oriented towards the non-expert and that may be a good thing.

IDrive:

The IDrive serve is offered at a similar pricepoint to the other services reviewed here : 2 Gb of free storage space and $49.99 for unlimited storage space. It also operates in a similar way, with a monitor program that sits in your tray, processing backups when they’ve been scheduled or when the use of the computer’s resources is low. Like the other services, IDrive integrates itself with the operating system, allowing you to add files to the backup set with just a right-click from Windows Explorer. A pseudo-drive will also appear within your My Computer tray. If you prefer the traditional approach, you can also use IDrive through a standard application UI. It comes with a wide array of options including bandwidth throttling, as well as broad-ranging support for special files. This support comes in the form of a screen which allows you to select any special file types, such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Illustrator files, that you want to back up.

Unfortunately, while useful, IDrive’s approach to this is somewhat clunky and consists of scanning all of your hard drives to find files of the designated type. This can take 20 minutes or so each time you do a backup so, if you’re in a hurry, it’s best to skip this option. IDrive’s tray application was somehow also able to corrupt the user interface in my Windows Vista installation, making it barely usable and forcing me to reset the PC. This always happened after a few hours whenever the tray application was enabled, even if it was not being actively used.

IDrive boasts of a few advantages over the competition. For one thing, it allows you to access the service from different computers, meaning you can let your friends have access to your stash of MP3s. It also supports true versioning in the files you back up, storing up to 30 different versions of each file. This can be useful if, for example, you’re working on your masterpiece in Photoshop and realised that you messed it up with your last few sets of edits.

All in all, IDrive is an attractive service, able to hold its own with the best of the other online backup options.

After you've used online backup services for a bit, it's hard to avoid feeling that they represent the future. Traditional backup software feels clunky and primitive by comparison, somewhat like using a wired mouse compared to an optical one. The user interfaces that comes with the major online backup services are already fairly slick and stocked with options. Free and by no means negligible amounts of storage space are readily available, and the price point for unlimited space is already fairly attractive and may become more so in future. Some other reviews of online backup services are linked to below : http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198800795&pgno=1 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/labs/118/online-backup/introduction.html

But there's one better than online backup solutions - a range of innovative ideas that the pros use. For example, did you know that you can backup your hard disk to your free gmail account or accounts? And that... oh, I'm giving too much away. We'll leave that for the next hub, coming soon. (Update: I've now posted it here)