Best Online Backup

There are four main aspects you need to consider when you decide what online backup provider to chose

• backup behavior
• restore options
• pricing
• security

Backup Behavior

Basically, this aspect decides how the software is going to back up your data. At what speed will your data be uploaded to the provider’s servers? Does the software allow you to customize what data to backup? Is there a upload bandwidth throttle that lets you decide what portion of your upload link is used to back up data? Is the bandwidth throttle smart and automatically changes itself depending on your activity or is it a manual setting? Does the software allow you to schedule backup tasks? And probably most importantly: does the backup software slow down your computer’s performance in a degree that makes it unusable for normal tasks?

Restore Options

In case you lose your data locally, you want to have access to your backups as quickly as possible. Most of the time you will not need all your data at once. Hence, the online backup should give you the opportunity to restore single files or folders. Also, what general restore options are available? Is the only way to get your data by download? Or does the backup provider offer to send you a hard drive or some other media by mail? Is there a web interface allowing you download files using a browser?

Pricing

While online backups might not be the best place to save a few dollars – having a working backup of your data is priceless – you cannot be blamed to find the best deal for the price you pay. Pricing basically comes in two flavours: a flat rate for an unlimited amount of data, or a rate based on the amount of data that you back up. Depending on the amount of data you own, either option has its value. Find out how many gigabytes of data you need to backup and try to assess the amount of data you are going to produce during the next year. Remember that you should only backup data that you created yourself: your photos, documents and spreadsheets you created yourself. Do NOT backup data that you downloaded from the web that will be available from the source again in the future – you’d not only waste backup storage, but also a lot of time – remember, online backups are not fast.

Security

If the data your need to backup contains sensible data you want to make sure your backup provider offers a level of security that lets you sleep calmly at night. At the very least, your data should be encrypted on the provider’s servers. Ideally your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer to be sent to the backup server. Of course, encrypting your data before sending it to the server will take some time, considering the general slowness of the upload itself, however, this is pretty negilible.

Our Selection of Providers

We limited our comparison to only a handful of providers on purpose. There is a about three dozens of good online backup solutions available on the market. The selection we made is based on our own experience (we tried 24 services in total) and the age of the services. This might not be fair to newer competitors, but then service age is a pretty good indicator for reliability and lets us rest assured that service will available for years to come.
Also, we only chose online backup providers in the most narrow sense of the term. Solutions like DropBox, JungleDisk, Amazon S3 are great ways to backup your data, but are either a little bit more involved or divide the management of data and the backup per se into two different tasks. We only look at services that let you select data you want to backup and manage the rest.

The Contenders

We are comparing the following providers

• Mozy
• Backblaze
• Carbonite
• iDrive

The Grid

To make things easier, the comparison is put down in the following grid. Additionally, we prepared an Excel spreadsheet that will easily let you add additional services to compare. You can download the backup comparison spreadsheet here.

Finally

Selecting the best online backup solution takes some time and research. With the staggering amount of providers on the market, you simply cannot evade spending some time figuring out which solution suits you best.