Over the years, physical storage has continued to decline in price. This trend has transcribed itself online with the introduction of bigger email boxes (first pioneered by Gmail, with an initial offering of 1GB of space) back in 2008, and in the introduction of many new online storage web applications. These apps offer the web user both additional capacity on their existing hard disk storage, and a myriad of backup options.
In many cases these online services actually work out cheaper in the long run than purchasing an additional physical disk, as well as being frequently backed up by the service provider. We all know what an absolute nightmare data loss can be so – I’m gonna take a look at some of the best of the best online storage and backup options out there at the minute.
DropBox
Free space: 2 GB
Pricing: 2GB: Free , 50GB : $9.99pm, 100GB: $19.99pm
Dropbox describe themselves as a “secure magic pocket” for your files. Across multiple PC’s files can be synch’d between PC’s, Macs, and even your phone. The free Dropbox account comes with 2GB of space that you can use for as long as you like for free, and the more commercial offerings offer up to 100GB for a flat monthly fee.
Dropbox is more of a file storage solution, than it is a backup one – but if you frequently come across the need for sharing files in folders that other people need to modify – its the perfect solution. If your business happens to be a small or micro organisation, the software can erradicate the need for a company intranet – just create the folders you need within dropbox and encourage folks to share, update and save files in the relevant places.
LiveMesh
Free space: 5 GB
Pricing: 5GB: free
LiveMesh is Microsoft cloud computing storage solution, and sends information back and forward between the desktop and the web. A download is required to synch the online and offline folders, and curiously – they’ve decided that folders and files should be uploaded via a web interface, built partly in their Silverlight technology. This creates a couple of problems.
Firstly it means that uploading large files is a bit of a pain; Microsoft provide 5GB out of the box for you to play around with, but depending on your server speed this could take a while to synch up. Whilst Dropbox looks and feels like an extension of your desktop, LiveMesh is clearly a web application designed for file storage. Secondly, the usage of Silverlight requires yet another download to get things up and going. Whilst I can see why they’ve done it, and Livemesh is a good example of the technology in use, it just feels a littel contrived to me. Another Microsoft offering where you can grab some space – is Skydrive – another plain upload service which gives 25GB for free. It doesn’t however have the fancy bells and whistles that Mesh has, and the interface is definitely not as polished. It may however be an option if you have patience, I imagine the large space offering is the result of people not being bother to use a web uploader to send files to it. There’s definitely scope for a programmer to come along and create a Desktop Client uploader.
Box.net
Free Space: 1 GB
Pricing: 1GB: free, 10GB: $9.95pm | 15 GB: $15pm a user, Higher (call for pricing)
Box.net is a commercial web app online offering file space and collaboration tools. It is not unlike some of the intranet applications I’ve previously reviewed – however its crucial difference is that it concentrates solely on files, rather than collaboration between people. The free account starts with 1GB and out of the box includes Google App and Mobile/ iPhone support. For many of you whom are looking for free storage online, its another service worth a look.
Premium versions start with the Individual account at $10 per month, right up to the business version which is priced at $15 per user. The additional functionality you receive mainly benefits those looking to collaborate with their files with others, as well as tracking previous file versions from the online interface. If you are solely looking for additional online space, you may be better with some of the other options. Enterprise pricing isn’t even listed on the site; a pet peeve of mine. If you are scared of being transparent, and showing your own pricing structure, its probably wrong.
Mozy
Free Space: 2 GB
Pricing: 2GB: free, Unlimited $4.95pm
Whilst there are a variety of Mozy alternatives on the market, they do offer Mozyhome for free, giving away 2 GB of space. You can receive more than that for by sneakily signing up some of your friends and family. For every two people you invite that start backing up, you’ll receive 1 GB of free space, so play your cards right and you can manage to get quite a decent amount of space on the cheap.
Like some of the other offerings here – Mozy works via a desktop program to sync up your files to the web, and works with both PC and Mac. It is a relatively small download, totalling about 9 meg in size, and installed for me relatively quickly.
Unlike some of the others mentioned previously, it works in a much more automated way. You simply decide on the encryption to use, which folders you want to send up to the web, and away it goes in the background. You can also choose whether you’d like Mozy to work only when your machine is idle, which is a nice touch to prevent it from hogging your bandwidth. The commercial offering starts from as little as $4.95 a month for unlimited space; that’s a hell of an offer considering the price of larger hard disks.
IDrive
Free Space: 2 GB
Pricing: 2GB: free, Unlimited $4.95pm
IDrive is a product of Pro Softnet Corporation, who also are behind IBackup.com. The basic version offers 2 GB of space for free, and a number of additional features. They support syncing, as per Mozy – but the added benefit of mapping a virtual drive will add extra appeal to many. The also have technology in place to detect changes and protect changed data by sending files online once they have been changed and saved to disk.
Extra web interface options are also available to search, restore and control versioning of files. You can also remotely access all of your backed up and restored information from the site.
IDrive offers both incremental and continuous backup. It also has idle backup and an option to select bandwidth in a similar way to Mozy.
ElephantDrive
Free Trial Available. Credit card required
Pricing: Home: $4.95pm | Home Pro $9.95pm
ElephantDrive offer two home edition options, Home edition standard, priced at $49.95 or Home edition Pro at $99.95. The difference between the two home editions is the number of machines with access to the service (1 and 4 respectively) – and the maximum individual file size. Storage on both plans is unlimited. Their business plans are also tiered in a similar way with a “standard” account available at $349.95 a year, and the Pro Plus edition at $99.95 a month ($1200) a year. Storage in the business account is 1 TB for the Pro Edition, or 2TB for the Pro Plus. They clearly recon the home users aren’t capable of meeting the storage limit! I’d love to test this theory, as I’ve a couple of disks over a TB in use on a home machine.
ElephantDrive don’t offer a free account as some of the other services mentioned here do, instead opting for a free 15 day trial of the service. Annoyingly they try to lock you into a subscription plan by way of a “forgot to cancel” scenario, and ask for your payment details up front prior to receiving the trial.
Elephant Drive requires the .NET Framework for execution – so if you haven’t got that installed, you will need to download it. Once you have everything installed and in place you can go about configuring your backups. It also heavily uses Amazon’s s3 service as its stoage location. A very clever way to get a business off the ground IMO. As per some of the other service, encryption is built in, and uploading files is as simple as selecting the folder you want to backup, and Elephant Desktop will start to encrypt and upload my files to your “Trunk. ” Overall, speed varied during an upload – but the simplicity of the service made up for it.
Carbonite
Free Trial Available.
Pricing: $ 4.57 pm
Carbonite is another service which only offers a paid for option, but they do offer a credit card free 15 day trial. The download for Carbonite was really speedy, with the footprint of the executable a measly 3.2MB. Setting it up was also relatively easy.
At first run, Carbonite connects to the Carbonite server, registers your computer – and configures the locations that you may want to send up to the web. You can choose to manually select files, or go with the default settings that it suggests. To get a feel for things quickly; I just let it select my Desktop and My Documents folder.
Carbonite doesn’t have a program interface as such – it simply adds a new item to your contextual (right-click) menu, enabling you to quickly add a new folder to the backup queue. Coloured “status dots” are then added to your folders and files to give you an indication of whether they are getting backed up or not. The main program sits in the taskbar quietly until you ask it to do anything and lets you see the progress of your upload. The first initial backup can take a while, but subsequent uploads after that are much quicker, particularly if you work inside the same folders.
Restoring files from the web is also built into an “online backup drive” interface within Windows Explorer. You simply select the files you wish to restore, and away it goes.
MyOtherDrive
Free space: 2 GB
Pricing: 2GB: free, 100GB (pm) – $4.99pm, 1TB $20.00
Myotherdrive not only provide you with an online backup solution, but also give their users a way to communicate freely with other members of a team. The interface closely resembles that of Facebook, allowing you to update status’ as well as checking how much storage you have left.
They provide you with two options for getting files into the system. One, is via the web interface itself. They use a traditional upload form to allow you to send files into the system directly from your hard drive – the other, and perhaps more intuitive way, is via a client program that you can download to your desktop and utilise. The client program supports Windows, Mac and Linux (written in Java) , giving it the cross platform support that many of the other systems lack.
Once you’ve logged into the Java application, you can select which files and folders you wish to upload. The program, whilst it can be minimised to the taskbar, doesn’t let you minimise to the status bar as it uploads – which I found a little annoying. They also (somewhere) in their t&c’s) decide you can be marketed to via email, and started to send me marketing mail shortly afterwards. Just a heads up if you decide to signup.
The social sharing concepts are also available within the interface as they are in the web app, and you can post a hyperlink to the web view of your files to Facebook easily. Perhaps this is a good feature for those of you looking to just store files online somewhere to share with others, but doesn’t really fit in with the online backup paradigm that they are communicating to their customers.
iStorage
http://www.iomega.com/istorage/
Free Trial Available.
Pricing: 1GB: $5.99, 5GB: $19.99, 10GB: $35.99, 15GB: $49.99
The iStorage interface follows the normal computing conventions, and looks similar to a drive on your computer with file trees. You can easily select the files you wish to backup via a checkbox, and away it goes. Your data is also encrypted when it is uploaded to your storage space and you can share files and folders with other users.
Out of all the services reviewed, iStorage was certainly the most expensive, and I imagine iomega are stuck between a rock and a hard place. I mean, how are you going to sell more hard drives if your online storage option is cheaper? You can receive up to twice the storage space for free with some of the other services mentioned here, and could save yourself $12 a month straight away by going with one of those.
Syncplicity
Free space: 2 GB
Pricing: 2GB: free, 50GB: $15.99
Syncplicity is a free and premium, currently Windows only file syncing tool. Like Dropbox, Syncplicity offer 2Gb of free storage and icons on your folders and files to easily keep track of their current file syncing status.
Downloading the executable was a simple process, at a measly 2MB in size, you can get going quickly, and out of the box the installer makes pretty sensible assumptions to let you get on with backing up your personal data. It did however decide half way through that it needed to kill my current instance of explorer, and start a fresh instance before it ran, so be warned not to have any critical work open when installing.
I found it a joy to use, and every bit if not better than it main competitor. They continue to innovate, with recent announcements such as syncing with online services like Google Docs and Facebook. They also give options to Sync with web apps – including currently Scribd, Zoho and the recent Google purchase Picnik. For enterprise users on the Google Apps platform, this will be an immensely useful feature. The only real thorn in their side currently is the lack of a Mac Client, which was previously discontinued.
linky
posted:March 19, 2010 12:30 am
Microsoft offers a 25 gig free skydrive, which you can map to using the following little utility http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/mount-windows-live-skydrive-drive-letter-windows-explorer/
infocyde
linky
posted:March 19, 2010 3:31 pm
You forgot Skydrive.live.com which has almost 25GB space for free.
ram
linky
posted:March 19, 2010 5:54 pm
These products all offer great services. I would always recommend Mozy, but it just all comes down to what best fits your needs. It’s always a smart thing to purchase online backup for your files, they are reliable and in time of a computer crash you can be relived. Thank you for posting this up, it was very informative.
Goose
linky
posted:June 21, 2010 1:36 pm
Very enlightening :) thx man!
Marco