If you’ve never experienced this emotion, you’re just going to have to trust me on this one — waking up the morning after a big storm, turning on your computer and instead of being met with the familiar welcome "ding" from your desktop having nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, happen is not a great feeling. Nor is packing up your computer and trudging down to the local Best Buy to have the Geek Squad look at it, and having them tell you that your motherboard and hard drive were fried by an electrical surge. And finally, what’s really not a great feeling? Realizing that the hard drive that the geek behind the Geek Squad counter just told you was destroyed contained basically every piece of work, every last song you downloaded, and every last picture you’ve taken for the past three years.
You’re probably not as stupid as I am in the sense that you may already have some sort of backup solution for your computer. At the time this happened to me, I didn’t have anything. So I basically had to reconstruct everything I had done over the past 2,000 days or so, and of course some of the things, like the pictures for example, were just lost forever. Well I’ve gotten a bit wiser since then, and I never operate any kind of computer now without a reliable online backup service. I also have secondary hard drives where all my material is backed up here in my home as well, but nothing beats the online backup for safety and the ultimate in security. Now the question is, of course, how do you choose the one that’s the best? Which is the best online backup service? We’re going to get to the answer to that question in just a second. But first I just wanted to give you a little bit of background on how these things work so that you can see for yourself which one might be best for your situation.
First, in my opinion it’s very, very, very (did I say VERY?) important that whatever online backup service you choose offers completely automatic, and hopefully continuous, backup. There is simply no way that you are going to be able to remember or want to do regular backups of your system. The service that I think is best — and again we’ll get to that in a second — downloads a tiny piece of software to your system and then backs up everything on your hard drive (or only the files you choose — it’s up to you). And it does it completely in the background so you never even know what’s happening, and on a continuous and automatic basis. The other thing I look for, of course, is price. You basically don’t want to be paying more than about five bucks a month (or 60 bucks a year) for the service. Now that may seem cheap for the peace of mind and security that you get, and I guess it is. But thanks to that competition that makes it so hard to choose which service you want to use, these guys have to compete against each other constantly. So they’re always trying to one-up each other when it comes to price.
There are two basic ways to backup your data: online services vs. desktop software
Online services
There are several online backup services to choose from. Most will cost you between $4 and $10 per month. A few things to look for in an online backup service are automatic backup (makes sure you’re always backed up without you having to do anything), encrypted backup (protects any sensitive data), and high limits (or no limits) on storage. My favorite service is Carbonite, after 8 months, I’ve been impressed with the rich set of features and good customer service, and the service costs you around $5 per month. Keepit is another good service. I’ve been testing their service for 2 months and so far been happy with it, but will need more time with it to give final verdict. The service is comparable to Carbonite, the nice thing with Keepit is that they compress your files before transferring so it doesn’t tie up your connection as much.
Another provider which I don’t have much experience with is Mozy, but I have heard some good things about the service too. Sundeep wrote a good review of the Mozy service here.
Desktop software solutions If you run a business with lots of sensitive data that you don’t want residing on someone else’s servers, you may consider a software solution. These are packages that you install on your computer(s) which then backup your software locally. You might look at Acronis as a good example of this - it’s a pretty high-end solution, but works well for businesses. Hope all this helps, feel free to ask me questions if you have them in the comments section!
