Top 5 Online Backup Services

It's a New Year and if you've not already got a backup system in place, it's time for a New Year's resolution, to set one up... (If you've already got such a system in place, one question – when did you last try and do a full restore from it?)

Anyway, I've been recently taking another look at the options available in the online backup space. If you're not familiar with the concept, the idea is that the data from your client computer is copied to a remote server via your internet connection. As a result, you get an easily updateable “off-site backup”, meaning that your data is safe from any local problems you may have.

It's hard to get a definitive ordering of the top online backup providers, but I've come up with what seems to be a valid “Top 5” to compare.

CrashPlan has a number of levels of service, starting with a free, ad-supported service that runs once a day and allows you to backup your changed files to various destinations such as a locally attached hard-drive, a local computer or a remote computer also running CrashPlan and whose owner has given permission for you to use them as a backup destination.

The free functionality may be extended by purchasing account upgrade subscriptions. The options currently available are subscriptions to “CrashPlan Central”, theirs online backup service that provides unlimited storage for your files in a secure data centre, while “CrashPlan+” upgrades the functionality from daily backups to continuous, real-time backups, removes the ads and provides priority customer support.

At present, CrashPlan Central costs $54 for the 1 year Individual Unlimited Plan, while CrashPlan+ costs $59.99. There are discounts for 2 & 3 yr plans and there are also Family Unlimited Plans if you & your family have more than a single computer to backup. There are also business packages available but they're outside the scope of this article.

One of the problems with using an online backup system as your main backup is that the first time it's used, there's a lot of data to backup/upload. CrashPlan's answer to this is to provide a service where, for a fee, they ship you a removable drive onto which you copy your data before returning the drive to them. CrashPlan then uploads the data to their servers for you and as a result, your backups only need to upload any changes made.

Mozy's “MozyHome Free” starter level takes the approach of allowing the user 2GB of free online backup space, which, while it won't allow all that many photos to be backed up, should be plenty for any documents you creating and to let you try the service. The paid version of their “Home” service currently costs $4.95 per month (per computer) but removes the 2GB limit, allowing unlimited storage.

MozyHome supports Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000 and Mac OS X 10.6, 10.5, and 10.4. It can be set to backup either on a schedule or waiting until the computer is idle – it also supports bandwidth throttling so as not to overload your internet connection.

One of the interesting options about this service is the option to get your restored files shipped to you via DVD – If you've been using them as your primary backup and have a lot of data to recover, this can compare well with trying to download them.

Backblaze doesn't have a free service, but instead offers a 15-day free trial, then charges $5/month per computer for unlimited storage. The approach that Backblaze takes is to try and ensure that all your user data is automatically backed up – to that end it will back up everything except operating system files, application files, temporary files or files greater than 4GB in size. It will backup attached hard drives, although not network drives or CDROMs and will keep multiple versions of changed files available for up to 30 days.

By default, it will monitor for changes and back them up immediately but can be set to only backup at a particular time or on command.

To restore, files can be downloaded directly for free or, for a fee, can be ordered on DVD or USB drive.

Backblaze supports Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit, Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit, and Intel-based Mac OSX 10.4 and newer.

JungleDisk is an online backup service with a difference, which is that rather than charge a per-computer rate, JungleDisk charges based on the data storage used. You also have a choice as to where your data is stored, where you can choose between Amazon S3 US storage, Amazon S3 EU storage and Rackspace Cloud Files storage.

JungleDisk have two “Personal” products, “Simply Backup” and “Jungle Disk Desktop”. “SimplyBackup” costs $2/month plus storage fees. Using Amazon S3 US as the example, storage fees are 15¢ per GB per month, with the first 5GB free. There are additional charges for accessing the data, i.e. 10¢ per GB of data uploaded (but free until June 30, 2010), 17¢ per GB of data downloaded plus 1¢ per 1000 upload requests and 1¢ per 10,000 download requests, but even then, this ends up being a very cheap way of storing data. The product license covers an unlimited number of computers and you can backup whatever you want, whether on a local drive or a network drive.

The “Jungle Disk Desktop” extends the “Simply Backup” product, adding syncing options and a network drive. The sync options allow you to have changes to a file automatically replicated to your online storage and other computers running Jungle Disk, while the Jungle Disk Network Drive allows you to access network files as if they were on a local drive attached to your computer. This option is priced at $3/month plus storage fees, as above.

While this makes it into the top-5 on popularity, Dropbox isn't really a true online storage backup solution like the others, but is more like the Jungle Disk Desktop Network Drive. Once installed, a Dropbox folder is available and anything placed within it will be synchronized with your Dropbox account, which includes a 30-day history.

The free account level allows for upto 2GB of storage, with the next level allowing upto 50 GB for $9.99/month. The main difference with the other services is that it only backups files placed within the folder manually, rather than monitoring for changes across the whole of the computer, so while it's certainly useful for backing up and synchronizing specific documents, it will take more effort to ensure that all the files that you might want to be backed up, are actually backed up.

After all that, there's no strong pointer to any particular service. My personal preference is for the Jungle Disk Desktop, as the Jungle Disk Network Drive is a useful feature when working with multiple computers, which I occasionally do. Without that requirement, though, I'm drawn to the the Backblaze service as being an easy one to get setup and started with, which is a big part of using a backup service.

A final thought: Don't forget that the main reason for a backup service is being able to restore files - be sure to test that part of any service you may be using!