There are now several online backup services out there. I’m only going to cover the ones that have both Mac and Windows support for now.

Mozy – I personally had nothing but problems with Mozy and had very poor experiences with their technical support.

Backblaze – So far, my dealings with their technical support have been excellent. They seem responsive. The software has you exclude data rather than include, and they said that’s because test versions indicated that users would rather have the software grab everything and let them choose what they don’t want backed up. I prefer to let it know what I *do* want backed up. Also, it purposely excludes certain system folders but I’m not thrilled with that list because some folders can contain important information.

Carbonite – my experience with this product have been limited, but I’ve sent a couple emails back & forth to their support people and have received timely replies. Carbonite doesn’t seem to have a month to month subscription plan like Backblaze and Mozy do.

Carbonite and Backblaze have Mac clients, but only for Intel based machines. PowerPC users are able to use Mozy – for now. All three providers advertise ‘unlimited data backup’ but Mozy rate limits inbound traffic to 1 megabit per second. That’s more than most cable modem and DSL connections can sustain, but it’s insufficient for FIOS users and users on higher speed connections. Also, it will take a VERY LONG TIME to back up any substantial amount of data. Backblaze told me that they are not rate limiting inbound traffic.

All three offer a free trial too. Unfortunately, none of them seem to offer a “Family Pack.”  That’s disappointing, since many households have multiple computers nowadays, and they shouldn’t be shunted off to a “Business” plan.

I’m not covering services like Amazon’s S3 because it’s generally geared towards ‘power users’ and more advanced users. The three services I mentioned are geared towards general home users who need a simple online backup solution. Backing up to a larger external hard drive is a good idea as well, and I think that users should do that in addition to using an online backup solution for files that you absolutely MUST have stored away safely. With more and more people buying digital cameras and using digital video devices, backup services are becoming more important all the time.

Tags: security, Technology