10 Sites for Backing Up Your Hard Drive

Offsite backup for your hard drive has become very convenient and affordable due to the growth of online backup services. There are both free and paid services available, each with their own data size packages. Each service also has it strengths and weaknesses.

1. Mozy 2.0 Online Backup This service gets high points for its ease of use, for both PC and  Mac users. Mozy recently dropped its free plans and its unlimited storage, but still has very affordable plans for either one or multiple computers. Mozy is also capable of backing up your external hard drives, as well as your computer. Its backups are scheduled rather than continuous real time backups, but it does provide  archiving support through the last 30 days. For backup recover it also provides paid options for DVD or usb recovery files in addition to its online restore.
2. Carbonite Online Backup This service has a restore assistant feature that is especially helpful for Mac users, though its online viewer of packages does not work as well for Macs, as the file viewer does for Windows users. The service provides unlimited realtime continuous backup, though it does have some limits on individual file sizes.  Pricing is quite affordable with discounts for purchasing longer plans.
3. CrashPlan Automatic Online Backup Service This service provides you with many options, including the capability of backing up to your own local hard drive. Like Mozy this backup service is NOT a continuous realtime solution. The pricing plans for this service are a bit complex, but very affordable and the storage is unlimited.
4. IDrive Online Backup Another realtime, continuous backup solution, IDrive is priced comparatively with Crashplan, Mozy and SugarSync. However, it provides archiving support for up to 30 versions of your files, not just the 30 days offered by Mozy, and does cap a single users storage at 150GB rather than the 50 provided by Mozy.
5. SOS Online Backup This solution provides similar realtime continuous backup and archiving capabilities as IDrive.  It is more expensive than the first four on this list at almost double the price for only 50GB of storage. In calculating your storage, the service does only count one version of each file towards your data limit, however, even though it is storing up to 30 versions.
6. SugarSync This service is priced per amount of data storage used, starting at 30GB and going up to 150GB. This service  has its strength in its mobile apps that are available for the iphone, Blackberry and Android phones, allowing you mobile access and sharing of your files that are backed up online.
7. Backblaze This service runs quietly in the background and then uploads your backup files while you are not using your computer. It has a powerful recovery and restore system, which can even be from a Mac to a Windows computer. In addition to the normal online restore it does provide paid options for DVD or USB recovery files. Its pricing structure is simple, one set fee regardless of the amount of data stored, and very inexpensive.
8. RemoteDataBackups This backup service provides some of the smallest amount of storage for the highest prices. The storage plans run from 1 to 100GB of storage. It has the same 30 day archive feature as Mozy but 1 GB of storage will cost you double what you’d pay for Mozy’s unlimited storage service.
9. Egnyte This service provides real time continuous or scheduled backups and focuses its marketing towards small and large businesses. It does provide mobile sharing of your backed up files on iphone, ipad, Blackberry and Android mobile devices. Because of its focus on businesses, its packages for larger businesses tend to be a better value than what it would provide for a singe user or household.
10. Dropbox If you’re looking for something free to keep your home documents backed up, Dropbox does have a 2GB free version as well as it paid versions with increased storage sizes. It does have mobile apps developed for the iphone, ipad, Blackberry and Android devices to allow you to share and access your files from them as well. Besides backup with a 30 version history, this is a syncing service as well. Anytime you change a document remotely, the new version will be synced back to all places that file is being accessed from.

Options, options, options! These are only ten of the many different online backup services currently available. Their features and pricing are continually changing in this highly competitive environment.

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