Pros and Cons of Internet Backups

There are several websites that offer to back up your files, some free and others that cost you. Perhaps the one item you should pay particular attention to is whether the website will stay in business. This  point is particularly significant. Setting up a proper online backup system involves a serious time commitment, so you don't want to waste that investment on a service that goes out of business. But it's not only a question of time and effort: imagine a situation where you need to recover your data from a backup, only to discover that your online backup service is no longer operating!

This is not a purely theoretical risk. In the last year, at least two popular free backup services that ceased operation, one of which was called The Linkup. Others will surely follow. Those who used these defunct backup services lost all the time and effort they had put into creating their backups. If their ISP caps the amount of data they can upload, they also lost the money spent transmitting their data to the remote server. And what has happened to the private data stored on these discontinued services? You have to fear the worst.

It is not recommended to use a totally free backup services for any critical data. If you decide to go the online-backup route, use a commercial service that has a viable business model and has been operating for some time. The good news is that some commercial services, such as Mozy, offer a limited free service. If you can live with the limitations, such a free service will be fine. You then have your free account, but you also have some guarantee of service continuity. Mozy also offers a Pro version which costs $3.95 + $ .50/GB per month.

The three commercial services that are rated high for storage of your valuable data are: Jungle Disk from Amazon A3, Mozy, and Carbonite. All three are well-established, have a solid user base, and provide a quality service. The three services have a lot in common. Each requires you to download and install a desktop client that you use to configure your backup, manage restores, and handle the regular background backup of new and altered files to the service's remote servers. Each service specializes in backup rather than in simpler and less-secure file sharing. All three encrypt your data before transmission and store it in encrypted form on their remote servers. You can also restore your data to a different computer.

Let's take a look at these three in more detail.

Jungle Disk/Amazon S3

With Carbonite, Mozy, and most other online backup services, you get a similar offering with similar pricing. The Jungle Disk/Amazon S3 service is quite different. The actual online storage is provided by the high-end Amazon S3 system that's designed for corporate and IT professionals. The "Amazon" here is the online book company, so we're talking about a serious player. Jungle Disk is the client program that allows users to access the Amazon S3 system. It's a product developed by a third party, not Amazon itself.

To use this system, you need to purchase the Jungle Disk client software for a once-off fee of U.S. $20 and you need to separately pay Amazon S3 monthly for the storage you use. The cost of the client covers any number of PCs accessing the same Amazon account. This contrasts with Carbonite and Mozy, where you pay separately for each PC.he S3 charge for online storage comes to roughly $0.15 per GB per month for storage used plus $0.10 per GB of data uploaded and $0.17 per GB of data downloaded.

But it's not only Jungle Disk's pricing structure that differs from Carbonite and Mozy: Jungle Disk is also faster and more full-featured. The service offers true network mapping. This means the files backed up to the Amazon server are accessible to you and your programs via a drive letter in Windows Explorer, Open and Save dialog boxes, and other folder windows. Jungle Disk supports the Mac OS and Linux as well as Windows.

Jungle Disk may have a lot of features, but it also has the most complex setup of the three products I tried. You need to sign up for an Amazon S3 account in addition to buying the Jungle Disk client. you don't have to be an expert to set up Jungle Disk, but you do need to be experienced. Certainly, beginners would be challenged.

     Strengths

You pay only for the storage you use
• Experienced users will appreciate the ability to create a backup set
• True network drive mapping allows your programs to access your server data directly
• Online storage backed by Amazon will be accessible even if the desktop-client vendor goes out of business
• Fastest of the three services tested
• Personal encryption key
• Data can be permanently archived
• All major platforms supported
• Desktop client can be used on any number of PCs
• Desktop client comes with unlimited lifetime upgrades

     Weaknesses

• Setup is more complex than with other services and not suited to beginners
• Resource throttling is not as flexible as in Mozy
• You need to buy the desktop client separately ($20)
• Requires a subscription to the Amazon S3 service
• Vendor of desktop client possibly not as substantial as other vendors

Mozy

Mozy, like Jungle Backup, offers unlimited storage but with slightly different pricing: $4.95 per month or $54.45 per year. You get more features with Mozy than you do with Carbonite for roughly the same price. Mozy is faster, offers Web access, and is more flexible in the way backup sets can be defined.

Most importantly, Mozy is the only one of the three services that offers a FREE option. The free service is for a maximum of 2GB of online storage, but if that's enough to hold your data, you need look no further.

     Strengths:

• Option of a free account, though limited to 2GB of online storage
• Experienced users will appreciate the ability to create a backup set
• Very flexible resource throttling
• Lots of setup options
• Calibrates your Internet bandwidth during setup
• Local 1GB caching of server speeds up operation
• Allows optional use of private encryption key
• Web-based restore
• EMC, the owner of Mozy, is a substantial company

     Weaknesses:

• More daunting for beginners than Carbonite
• No genuine network mapped drive in home version
• Poor archiving — old versions deleted after 30 days
• No file-sharing option
• Separate license required for each PC

 

Carbonite

Carbonite offers unlimited online storage for a flat fee of $49.95 per year. It's the easiest of the three products to set up and has the best user interface. However, Carbonite is also the slowest of the three and the most limited in other respects. The service doesn't allow the use of personal encryption keys and lacks a Web interface. The latter problem means that the only way you can access your data stored on the Carbonite server is by installing the Carbonite client software.

     Strengths

• Easy-to-use interface
• Select files to back up by right-clicking, which is intuitive and easy for beginners
• Default selection of files to backup will suit most users - multy-year discounts available

     Weaknesses:

• Lack of traditional "backup sets" will annoy advanced users
• No provision for personal encryption key
• Client must be installed in order to recover data
• No Web-based restore feature
• No genuine network drive mapping, so your programs cannot access remote files directly
• Poor archiving — old backups are deleted after 30 days
• No file-sharing option
• Separate license required for each PC
• Slowest of the three

Conclusion

For backup sets less than 20GB, Jungle Disk is the clear winner on both price and features. Similarly, anyone with several PCs to back up will be attracted to Jungle Disk's licensing policy, which allows use of the client on any number of systems. If you need to back up less than 2GB of data, then the free version of Mozy's service is an easy first choice. If you need to back up more than that amount of data and you're a beginner with PCs, then Carbonite is your best bet because it is so simple to use.

Top of Page

Back to Main Page