Posts Tagged ‘critical data’

Online Backup

A few days ago, I dis­cus­sed a bac­kup tool named Cobian and I pro­mi­sed to look into online space for off­site storage.

While loo­king around a I found quite a few, but focu­sed on three.  I will go over some of my ini­tial impres­sions, and direct links to the site (so the FTC doesn’t chase me down for get­ting something for giving my opinion).

The three I will be tal­king about are iDrive.com, Mozy.com, and Humyo.com.  Now the first thing that’s impor­tant to ever­yone is, how much space do I get.  iDrive and Mozy both have 2 gigs for free, but this link (I pro­mise I get nothing) will get you a 250 MB upgrade on Mozy.  Humyo might as well be called Humon­gous giving you a whop­ping 10 GB online sto­rage.  Now this is all FREE.

Of course, if you find you are run­ning out of space, you can pay for upgra­des.  For $4.95 a month you get expand to 150 GB on iDrive, Mozy gets to be a bit more expen­sive, using the pay as you go model at $3.95 a month per 500 MB.  My opi­nion on that is if you are paying that, pay for hos­ting.  In the odd case that you will need more then 10 GB for bac­king up your most cri­ti­cal data on Humyo it will run you $6.99 a month to get 100 GB.

So besi­des space, I am sure there are pro­bably other things to con­si­der.  Let me think…

How do I get my data from my com­pu­ter to my sto­rage place.  Well all three have a client that you can ins­tall on your com­pu­ter.  Though Humyo requi­res you have a paid account to use the client.  It does, howe­ver, have a web con­sole you can drag and drop into a java upload client.

The clients are nice and small, quick easy down­loads, so I won’t get into that.  Some of the things that I noti­ced on the client.

For the Mozy client, it auto­ma­ti­cally gives you a recom­men­ded bac­kup set, inc­lu­ding Thun­der­bird data.  Since I use Thun­der­bird, that is handy to have.  It also gives you two options of data encryp­tion.  If you push have VoIP pho­nes, or band­width issues in gene­ral, you can throttle the appli­ca­tion as well as sche­dule your bac­kups for slow net­work times.

iDri­ves’ client is not as fully fea­tu­red (at least not to the naked eye).  The ini­tial bac­kup set is your docu­ments and set­tings fol­der.  With some dig­ging around you can setup band­width thrott­ling also.  But it does have a synch option (quick delete if you erase a fol­der and want it pulled out of your bac­kup) and con­ti­nuous bac­kup.  Though I am not sure how often it checks.

Since you have to have a paid account for the Humyo client, I will not review it.

Ok.  We have now bac­ked up all the data and sure enough, we have to refor­mat or our machine, boooo.  Or we just got a new com­pu­ter and we want to get our docu­ments back, yeah!

How do we get it back.  Of course for both iDrive and Mozy you can use the client and res­tore. But… I want more.  It’s free, I want it all.

For Mozy you have a two options: You can use a vir­tual drive (crea­ted when the client is ins­ta­lled) and drag and drop or pay for a DVD to be crea­ted and FedEx to deli­ver the disk.

With iDrive, you can go to the site and login.  Going into the res­tore area you can use a Java applet to down­load your files.  Or you can get a second down­load to create a vir­tual drive and go through your Win­dows Explorer.

Well Folks.  I hope that helps a bit.  Remem­ber, bac­kups are important…Before the sys­tem crashes.