In the past few weeks several friends and colleages of mine have had their laptops stolen. Work files, personal files, software… poof! All gone. ¡Ay, caramba! Their misfortune inspired me to send out a quick note about how easy and cheap it is to do backups now.
Backup the old-school way meant buying a separate hard drive or computer and some backup software, and then regularly (1) backing up, (2) praying it worked properly (honestly, who has time to test restoring files? yawn.), and (3) praying nobody breaks in and steals your backup drive.
Over the past few years a host of online backup services have emerged that make it way easier and, at least in the short term, cheaper, to do backups. The idea is to set it up, and then forget it. Whenever you’re online backup just works silently in the background.
I am not yet using any of these online backup services (I’m still old-school), but I’m getting ready to, and from what I’ve read so far these are the two I want to try:
- Mozy. Automated online backups. Free for up to 2 GB, or unlimited storage for $5/month per computer.
- JungleDisk. Automated online backups and file sharing. You can share an account across as many computers as you lke. Pricing is harder to predict, since it depends on usage. This blogger says he’s paying "less than $5/month for about 26 gigs of storage plus daily backups across four machines - no per machine cost." (He uses Mozy too, by the way.)
Both Mozy and JungleDisk support PCs and Macs, which is a must for me.
Mozy is the simpler of the two products, and several friends of mine swear by it as a cheap and easy-to-use solution that just works. The 2GB free offer also makes it a no-brainer to try.
From what I can tell JungleDisk is a more cost-effective and flexible solution for techies and small businesses or home offices with multiple computers. It also lets you use your online backup as a shared network drive, which Mozy doesn’t do. JungleDisk costs a $20 one-time fee plus Amazon’s S3 fees… details here. The downside is a little more complexity than Mozy.
Both services should also be long-term reliable: EMC recently acquired Mozy, and JungleDisk uses Amazon’s S3 service for file storage. EMC and Amazon aren’t going away anytime soon.
Also worth mentioning: apart from online backup, I’m increasingly using other online services to get stuff done. All of my email is in Gmail, for instance, and we’starting to use Google Docs as our online document sharing solution for Mukodu. Using services like these makes my computers a lot more disposable, which I find to be a great relief.
So… what are you waiting for? Go get yourself some backup!
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Notes and links:
- ars technica did an excellent review of online backup solutions in July 2007. They looked at Carbonite, Mozy, AOL XDrive (don’t go there) and Iron Mountain’s Connected Backup/PC. Mozy was the winner of the crop… they gave it a big thumbs up for its simplicity and price/storage ratio.
- TechCrunch, The Online Storage Gang. Jan 2006. A comparison of 13 online storage companies.
- PC World reviewed WebRoot Secure Backup Service. Looks interesting, especially the file sharing capability. No Mac support though.
- I checked out Microsoft OneCare, assuming it would have online backup too. Oddly, OneCare only offers online backup for photos, at $50/year for up to 50 GB. Wuh?
- Microsoft also offers Windows Live SkyDrive, which gives you 5GB of free online storage. Appears to be aimed at file sharing rather than backup.
- Amazon S3 is an online storage service geared at techies. JungleDisk, which I mentioned above, is a consumer product that sits on top of it. (Hmm… maybe Amazon should just buy JungleDisk.) For techies, check out this interesting writeup by Jeremy Zawodny of ways to back up to S3.
- Google is rumored to be coming out with an online backup service too.
