Web Backup Guide

Life has turned digital and, these days, it seems that everything we are is stored digitally somewhere.  It’s all pretty convenient until, that is, your hard drive crashes, your laptop gets stolen or you misplace one or more of the files.  Then the nightmare begins.  Of course, it’s no great problem because we all read the guidelines, we all followed the advice and we all backed up our files…….. didn’t we??

The figures, according to Carbonite the web backup service, are pretty astounding.  They reckon that every year 43% of us lose an irreplaceable file and that’s not to mention the 10% or so of hard-disk crashes or the 97% of stolen laptops that never get recovered.  It all sounds pretty scary but hey, it always happens to someone else anyway.  Sadly, that someone else has been me, and on more than one occasion.

I used to consider myself pretty good with backups – I used to back my files up to CD or DVD but it was a bit of a pain, I never did it as often as I ought and I often misplaced the disks. Then I moved on to harddisk backup – that was a lot quicker and some external backup drives have a little button that kicks off the process for you.  There was a downside to this approach too – the hard drive was next to my laptop or, at best, in the same building.  This is all very well but it doesn’t protect against theft when both the original and the backup may get taken or a fire / flood where you might loose everything.

I’m not so worried about my emails, music or random documents but family photos and financial records are another thing. How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and everything was gone?

Solutions were pretty limited but the answer seemed to lie with off-site, online or web backup but that was really the domain of business users and pretty expensive.

Things have changed, the market has seen an influx of new, low cost consumer web backup services available for both PC and Mac OS X.  Leading the field are Carbonite, Mozy and Backblaze with some competition from the less popular Symantec Norton Online Backup – it’s retail version of the newly acquired SwapDrive system geared for business use.

Carbonite, Mozy and Backblaze offer a web backup service for a low annual fee and unlimited backup space with Carbonite offering a free 15 day trial and both Mozy and Backblaze having monthly payment options.

Some users may be concerned about security of online backup services but each of these services encrypts your data locally on your machine before backing it up online to their storage servers and even the web backup provider cannot decrypt it without your password.

Restoring the files with both Mozy and Carbonite can be done via a web based interface without installing the software.  Carbonite even allows you to utilise this system to access your web backup to get hold of files whilst you are away from home which is pretty handy.  Mozy and Backblaze each have a “DVD by Post” option for a fee.

In short, online web backup is here and available at a pretty reasonable cost.  The Web Backup Guide follows the coming of age of the online backup services with news and reviews of the products as well as guides, tips and tricks for getting your data backed up securely online.

Technorati Tags: Web Backup