Online backup solutions are becoming very popular due to the growing sizes of pictures and music. It is difficult to remember to back up files and to do it on a periodic basis. Online backups make it easy to protect your documents, pictures, and music by backing up your files over the Internet.
- Who backs up your files? Websites offer this service where from all over the country and world.
- Where do your files go? The websites are owned by people who store your files on their servers and computers. These machines usually have backups themselves or some form of redundancy to further ensure your data is safe.
- How do you retrieve your files? These online sites have an easy interface to select which files you’d like to recover or copy back to your computer.
Here are the top 4 online back-up sites:
- IDrive: Offers 2GB of space for free; unlimited space for $49.95/year for personal use; or starts at $99.50/year for 50GB for business use. One of the most affordable and secure, encrypted solutions.
- Carbonite: A new service that offers unlimited data backups for any user for $49.95/year or $89.95/ 2 years. Great price for all users, but back-up and restore time is on the slow side.
- IBackup: Starting at $9.95/month for 10GB, this online service offers the best scheduling, restore, and success confirmation features. You will get the best peace of mind with this stable and secure service.
- Mozy: Provides $4.95/month for unlimited data on 1 home computer or $3.95/month per license as well as 50 cents per 1GB for 1 business computer. Probably the easiest interface to work with, but is limited to 1 computer per license so you might have to ask Mozy for permission to restore files to another computer.
All of these online backups are offered for Windows and Mac computers. It is recommended to try a demo of all of above software first to ensure which interface and features are right for you.
