Why should you perform an Online backup?

PC Tips | SahL | November 5, 2011 4:36 am

Disasters both natural and human-caused can threaten your precious files at any time: a fire, power surge, or leaking pipe could fry your system. Even without suffering a calamity, there are plenty of other threats to locally stored data—hard drive failure, accidental erasures, or a lost or stolen laptop could make you a victim of data loss. By data, here, we mean things like your irreplaceable family photos, videos, and music as well as documents.

Since online backup services securely store your files away from your premises at off-site server locations, your data will stay intact and available even if your local disks are stolen or your premises suffer some disaster. With more and more emphasis on “cloud computing,” it only makes sense that backup should take advantage of this hot trend in technology. Below we take a close look at ten of the most popular and innovatice cloud backup services to help you choose the one that’s right for your needs and budget.

Pricing Changes

The online backup space continues to evolve. The largest supplier of online backup, earlier this year Mozy made news by announcing that it would no longer offer an unlimited storage option, due to excessive storage demands by a small percentage of users. Carbonite still offers an unlimited storage plan for $59 a year (raised from $55 last March) and IDrive recently announced a very affordable unlimited plan at $49.99 a year. “Unlimited” isn’t exactly infinite, though. These plans limit you to the amount of storage on the covered computer’s hard disk, and both of them slow your transfer speed if you exceed 200GB or 150GB respectively. The plans also limit you to a single PC at those price points.

Mobile Apps

The services have also added mobile apps for devices like iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Some, like SOS Online Backup offer not only access to your online backed-up files, but also the ability to send links to files downloads to your contacts. IDrive offers a separate iPhone app that doesn’t offer that capability, but does let you back up your phone’s contacts and photos—for free. KineticD has a remote control capability to its iPhone and Web versions, which makes sense, since you’re likely to have the backup app running on your main PC all the time.

Folder Syncing

Another pairing with online backup is folder syncing, which services like MiMedia and Nomadesk offer. These let you designate folders on multiple systems that will automatically be updated whenever you add or change a file in either. But perhaps the most fascinating twist on online backup comes from CrashPlan, which actually lets you specify a friend’s computer as your online backup target, saving you from paying for sever storage.