Online Backup...

A few days ago, I discussed a backup tool named Cobian and I promised to look into online space for offsite storage.

While looking around a I found quite a few, but focused on three. I will go over some of my initial impressions, and direct links to the site (so the FTC doesn’t chase me down for getting something for giving my opinion).

The three I will be talking about are iDrive.com, Mozy.com, and Humyo.com. Now the first thing that’s important to everyone is, how much space do I get. iDrive and Mozy both have 2 gigs for free, but this link (I promise I get nothing) will get you a 250 MB upgrade on Mozy. Humyo might as well be called Humongous giving you a whopping 10 GB online storage. Now this is all FREE.

Of course, if you find you are running out of space, you can pay for upgrades. For $4.95 a month you get expand to 150 GB on iDrive, Mozy gets to be a bit more expensive, using the pay as you go model at $3.95 a month per 500 MB. My opinion on that is if you are paying that, pay for hosting. In the odd case that you will need more then 10 GB for backing up your most critical data on Humyo it will run you $6.99 a month to get 100 GB.

So besides space, I am sure there are probably other things to consider. Let me think…

How do I get my data from my computer to my storage place. Well all three have a client that you can install on your computer. Though Humyo requires you have a paid account to use the client. It does, however, have a web console you can drag and drop into a java upload client.

The clients are nice and small, quick easy downloads, so I won’t get into that. Some of the things that I noticed on the client.

For the Mozy client, it automatically gives you a recommended backup set, including Thunderbird data. Since I use Thunderbird, that is handy to have. It also gives you two options of data encryption. If you push have VoIP phones, or bandwidth issues in general, you can throttle the application as well as schedule your backups for slow network times.

iDrives’ client is not as fully featured (at least not to the naked eye). The initial backup set is your documents and settings folder. With some digging around you can setup bandwidth throttling also. But it does have a synch option (quick delete if you erase a folder and want it pulled out of your backup) and continuous backup. Though I am not sure how often it checks.

Since you have to have a paid account for the Humyo client, I will not review it.

Ok. We have now backed up all the data and sure enough, we have to reformat or our machine, boooo. Or we just got a new computer and we want to get our documents back, yeah!

How do we get it back. Of course for both iDrive and Mozy you can use the client and restore. But… I want more. It’s free, I want it all.

For Mozy you have a two options: You can use a virtual drive (created when the client is installed) and drag and drop or pay for a DVD to be created and FedEx to deliver the disk.

With iDrive, you can go to the site and login. Going into the restore area you can use a Java applet to download your files. Or you can get a second download to create a virtual drive and go through your Windows Explorer.

Well Folks. I hope that helps a bit. Remember, backups are important…Before the system crashes.