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Please note that this post was originally published more than a year ago and may contain outdated information. Although the concepts and principles are generally still relevant, some of the references may no longer be up-to-date.With the ever-growing role technology plays in our day-to-day life and the amount of valuable data stored on our personal computers, having a backup of all that precious data is a very good practice. Your important documents, irreplaceable digital photos, music files purchased online, email messages, etc. can all be lost if your laptop gets stolen, your hard drive fails, or your computer gets destroyed by a giant alien robot, just to name a few plausible, real-life, scenarios.
Maintaining a backup copy of your data can be time consuming and frustrating, as you don’t really want to spend a lot of time any time doing it. Any automation facilitating the process is a definite plus. Backing up your data on an external drive connected to your computer is a good start. But storing this backup copy near the original is not a great scenario, since disasters such as theft, fire, flood, electrical surges, a giant alien robot, etc. are likely to cause damage to the backup copy as well as the original. Now, having an off-site backup solution would solve that problem. But again, it need to be simple, otherwise you will most likely never get to it on a regular basis. Search no more, I present to you the online backup solution.
Online backup solutions for consumer have been around for a while now (around 2005), but are often considered overkill by many who feel that backing up on an external hard drive is more than enough. In early 2010, my wife went back to university to start her PhD. Given the importance of the work she was now saving on her laptop on a daily basis, I needed to find a solid backup solution that would be as low maintenance as possible. In my own quest of an automated, low-maintenance, backup system, I’ve tried a few in the last couple years. Some are dedicated backup services, others are a mix between online backup/storage/file sync services. To name a few: Mozy, Carbonite, SugarSync, CrashPlan, Dropbox, Syncplicity, Wuala, Backblaze, Microsoft Live Mesh, etc.
How do these online backup services work?
The various services operate slightly differently from each other, but in a nutshell, an online backup service typically installs a small piece of software on your computer. The software provides an interface to manage the folders and files you want to include in your backup and to manage other functionalities of the service (schedule, encryption, compression, etc.). The software usually runs in the background and automatically detects when a file is created or modified, and uploads the up-to-date version of the file when your computer is not in use (at night for example). Some services even allow you to backup new or updated files in real-time, as soon as it is detected on your computer, providing continuous data protection. Your backed up files are stored in the Cloud, on servers managed by the service provider. Most of the services use strong encryption to keep your data secure. Depending on the amount of data you want to backup and the speed of your Internet connection, the initial full backup process can take a few days, but after that, the software will only need to do smaller data transfer of new and updated files. To recap, once the initial installation and setup are completed, you don’t have to do much: everything is automated and your data is backed up.
Is online backup the right solution for you?
One of the issues with an online backup solution is that all your data needs to be backed up via your Internet connection, which can be a problem if you want to backup hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of data (large files, video files, HD movies, etc.). In this case, you could chose to use an online backup service to take care of most your data (critical documents, digital photos, music, etc.), and use external hard drives to backup the remaining very large files locally (large video files, etc.).
Access your files from your mobile device
Some services even offer the ability to access your backed up data from a variety of mobile devices. You can view and share files on mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android devices, etc.
Recommendations
All the services mentioned earlier in this article offer different features, functionalities, and pricing structures. Depending on your backup needs, some services might be better suited to your situation than others.
At home, I've been using SugarSync and CrashPlan for the past 2 years. SugarSync for its ability to manage and backup multiple computers under one account, and its ability to sync files between multiple computers in real-time over the Internet. CrashPlan for its ability to save the backed data to multiple destinations: For example, you can chose between CrashPlan's online backup servers, other computers or drives on your local network, or even computers owned by family and friends for a free off-site backup solution. Although SugarSync and CrashPlan have specific features that might be of interest for a power user (who is afraid of giant alien robots destroying his/her computer and wants to be extra safe), these extra features make SugarSync and CrashPlan a little bit more complicated to setup and manage. For most users, the added complexity will not have any benefits. This is why in most cases, I would recommend Mozy, and Carbonite. Mozy and Carbonite are the most commonly known services at the moment, and are great online backup solutions.
All the services mentioned in this article offer a free trial period during which you can use and test the service to make sure it is the perfect online backup solution for you.
