our philosophy about online backup
It’s probably fairly obvious that we believe you should backup your files. There are many ways to do it, but we believe that some ways are better than others. Backing up to external drives, CDs and other computers on your network protect against hard drive failure, but what about things like fire and theft. Irreplaceable files like digital pictures, tax and financial records and other important files should be stored at an off-site, secure location. You could burn a CD and store it in a safety deposit box, but few people do and it becomes out-of-date immediately.
Online backup has become pervasive with the advent of ubiquitous broadband. Even the slowest broadband speeds eclipse dial-up throughput by several factors. With this foundation in place online backup providers are coming out of the woodwork. We believe that online backup has become a commodity. With annual prices around $50, a typical home user can backup all of their important documents and feel relatively certain that their documents are safe. The possibility that your hard drive might crash and your online backup will fail isn’t impossible, but it isn’t very likely either.
There are many out there that are reviewing online backup solutions. We have found some objective opinions, but many seem colored by advertising or some other agenda. We have absolutely no affiliation with any of the companies that we review. We simply try the backup solution and give you our honest feedback of how it performed. We do have some advertising on our site provided by Google Adsense, but we don’t endorse any particular company that may be displayed while your are viewing our reviews. If you do decide to try one of the solutions from our review and see an ad in the right channel for that solution we would appreciate it if you would click on that ad so that we can make a few dollars and continue providing these reviews.
One factor to keep in mind about online backup is that it will be much slower than backing up to your local network. It can take many days to backup only 10GB; although, once your initial backup is in place incremental backups are no big deal. If you want to backup every file on your computer including OS files and applications then you will want to do that with a local device and just backup unique files (pictures, financial records, etc.) to your online backup account.
Security of your data is something that you should not take lightly. We believe that many online backup providers have considered security in their process and have implemented good controls. It is a bit difficult to test every provider and ensure that they do what they say they will do, but as part of our reviews we try to understand what they are doing with regards to security and test as much as we can. We are not providing a detailed security audit and most of our review is based on what the provider reveals about their security and what is easily assessed by trying their service. Check out some more of our thoughts on security.
Your data is important to you and yet most of us take a chance everyday when we fail to do anything about the possibility that our hard drives might crash.