Previously:
BACKUPS – INTRODUCTION
BACKUPS – DATA vs. DRIVE IMAGE
BACKUPS – EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES
BACKUPS – SOFTWARE FOR DATA BACKUPS
There are dozens of services to help you back up your data online.
- Some programs include built-in services for online backups of the program data. (Examples: Quicken & Quickbooks; Adobe Photoshop Elements.)
- Services come and go like wildflowers to copy data to online servers, where it will be safe until the backup company goes out of business. A quick Google search for “online backup” will turn up too many choices. I don’t know anything about this collection of reviews but at least it focuses on only eight of the online backup services and most of the names have been around for a while – Mozy, Carbonite, BackBlaze, IDrive, and more. All of them are cheap, a few dollars per month. (If you enjoy being confused, here’s another set of reviews that reaches wildly different conclusions.)
Typically the online services install a bit of software that runs continuously with an icon down by the clock. You’ll identify what data to backup (with more or less effort), then the software will copy that data to the online vault. Some of them run at scheduled times, others claim to run kind of continuously. Some of the services will keep different versions of files as they change, some claim to use bandwidth intelligently so the backup doesn’t choke off your Internet connection, some offer unlimited space for a fixed price and others charge by the amount of space used by your backups.
I don’t have any strong reason to steer you to one or the other. Any of them will protect your data if you understand how it works, set it up correctly, and make sure it’s doing its job. Here are a few thoughts:
- Online backups are surprisingly slow! If you’re backing up several gigabytes of data, the first backup might take literally a week to finish. Don’t panic.
- Mozy has been around forever. I had a poor experience with it a couple of years ago but that could happen with any of these services. The Mozy software used to put up this message when a backup job was starting:
“Reticulating spines.” See, it’s a joke – it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a geeky sounding phrase from a Sims game. It’s not clear that the startup of a backup program is a good time to make a funny joke. I don’t know if Mozy still tells funny jokes.
- BackBlaze is worth considering because of the cool video on the home page of the woman setting fire to a notebook – plus it’s easy to set up and only five dollars per month. To give you an idea of how opinions vary, here’s a writeup from somebody who found the simplicity was just right, and here’s somebody who got pissy because it was too simple.
- I signed up with JungleDisk because backups are stored on Amazon’s S3 servers, so theoretically my data can be recovered even if JungleDisk goes out of business. I’m not positive that’s true but it makes me feel better. JungleDisk is much more flexible – it can be run on multiple computers and it offers complete freedom to choose folders to back up. That works if you have enough knowledge to identify the folders with important data.
- If your computer crashes, you’ll run a routine from the service to restore your data. Some of the services let you access your backed up files from any computer in a web browser; others require that their software be installed on the repaired computer to run the restore process. It will be a slow process in either case. A few of the services will send you DVDs with your data after a crash for an extra charge.
Let me make one suggestion. I want each of you to have two methods of backing up your computers. If you like the idea of using an online service for backups, choose one and make it work – but also do backups onto an external hard drive or one of the other types of backups I’ll be discussing in the next few days.
Next: Image-based backups.
