Computer Sales and Support

Best Online Backup Solution

Posted on 07. Aug, 2009 by admin in Security, Software

The Crucial Need For Backup

If you are a serious computer user or just someone that uses their computer a significant amount of time, you want to make sure that you don’t lose your programs and data. The best way to protect yourself is to have a good backup plan.

If your computer or property ever experience a severe physical problem such as a fire or theft or breakdown of your hard drive, you could lose all your pictures, media, important papers and information and lose access to the Internet and your email contacts. If you made a change to a program that you don’t like and want to go back or get your system back to the way it was before a virus attack, restore from a backup is the way to do it. If you spent 50 hours doing a report and accidentally erased or wrote over it, a quick restore will bring it back from the abyss.

General Backup Strategy

There are a number of features that  a good backup plan should contain:

• Backing up should be easy and automatic
• It should be quick and easy to find the data that you want to restore
• It should handle a total wipe out of your hard drive and be able to do a bare metal restore (restore everything from scratch)
• It should provide maximum safety for your data
• It should provide high availability features like those found in a standard disaster recovery plan

Overall Approach

All of these goals can be met by doing the following. Get a top level local backup program such as Acronis backup and back up your system to an external drive on a regular, automated basis. Get an extra external drive to which you will do a full image backup of your entire system and keep the drive somewhere safe off of your premises. Subscribe to an online backup service for your most important data whch will capture changes as they happen and save them in the background while your work on other things.

Get 10% off on Acronis True Image Home 2010 with Coupon Code NDJATIH2010

For details of the local backup see Computer Backups

Easy and Automatic

A good backup program such as Acronis True Image Home 2010 can be easily set up to automatically do a full backup followed by daily incremental backups automatically. Most online backup programs will also work automatically in the background. The automatic features guarantee that the backup will get done since you don’t have to get involved once it’s set up.

Get 10% off on Acronis True Image Home 2010 with Coupon Code NDJATIH2010

The backup program should make it easy to navigate files and directories to find the files that you want to restore and allow you to specify where you want it to copy to. You don’t want confusing or complex methods of finding and restoring your data frustrating you while you are sweating to get your info back or even causing you to fail to restore properly.

Full Restore

Acronis and other high quality backup programs will allow you to make a full image backup of your system onto your extra hard drive that you will store somewhere else so that if disaster strikes, you will be able to recover your entire system quickly and easily.

Get 10% off on Acronis True Image Home 2010 with Coupon Code NDJATIH2010

Maximum Safety and High Availability

Maximum safety for your data is provided by having multiple copies of it. Your data will reside in 3 places. It will be on your hard drive, your external back up drive and on the servers of your online backup company.  Redundancy is the key to safety. If any 1 or 2 fail, you still have the 3rd for recovery. If your online backup company goes out of business or their servers get hosed, you still have your own data.

High availability is provided by having your data in multiple places so that if a cataclysmic event occurs in one site, the other is still safe.

The Role of Online Backup

Online backup is not really intended for very large file backups and restores or for massive backups and restores. It takes an hour or more per gigabyte depending on your bandwidth

Therefore, online backup is not really intended for a full or bare metal restore of your system. It takes much too long to backup all your data and to restore it. Additionally, considering the expense of online backup systems with the cheapest being $50 for 150 GB and that current systems typically come with a 350 GB drive, the cost would be prohibitive.

Online backup is useful for the following capabilities:

• a very high level of data safety
• backup when you are away from your backup equipment
• continuous data protection

A good company will insure that any data transferred to them is absolutely safe and redundant. The online backup companies use Raid storage. This is a sytem where the data is spread and duplicated across multiple hard drives at the same time. This means 1 or 2 full drives can fail and the data is still untouched.  Data loss would only occur in the very low probability event of several drives failing in the same array.

Besides this it is impossible for these companies to survive without full disaster recovery capabilities. In order to achieve this they would have to have at least 2 full sets of server systems in different places.

Online backup is also ideal for those who travel and can’t always get to a backup system. All you need is an Internet connection and your backup continues.

Those services that backup in the background and are always on provide continuous data protection. Any change that is made is saved shortly after it happens. Coupled with archiving, where every version of a file is kept, you get total data protection.

Online backup is needed for extra insurance for your most important data. You can also safely offload files that you don’t want to keep on your active system with full confidence that the data will be available on the super safe online backup servers.

Idrive meets the challenge and provides superior online backup. It can also handle a full system as well  for those who want to do this despite the issues involved.

What to Look for

The backup should not get in your way or slow you down. There are programs that work only in the background and others that only work on a schedule and others that can work either way.

It should be automatic. It can either run in the background all the time if it doesn’t affect your speed and it should be possible to schedule it for idle times if you want to or it gets in the way.

You probably want to send highly sensitive data to the online backup company. You don’t want anyone including the employees of the backup company getting at your stuff. This is accomplished by encrypting your data. It’s scrambled and unreadable without being decoded. Some companies have a standard encryption key that they use. Others let you make up your own key so that only you can ever see it. When you restore the data to your system it’s scrambled and you have to decode it using your key. Be very careful in this case. If you ever lose this key, no one can get this data back for you.

It should provide for open file backup. This means that your data can be backed up even when you’re working with it. If you don’t have this feature, data like Outlook email won’t make it to your online backup.

It should be friendly and easy to use.

It should allow for resumption of interrupted uploads and downloads. This is especially important if you have a flaky Internet connection.

Nice to haves

Some programs add a new piece of information to your Windows Explorer to show which files have been backed up.

Some provide the ability to immediately back up files that are waiting to be backed up.

Archiving is a feature that every version of a file that was ever created is retained until the user indicates that he/she only wants to save the latest version. This can really help if you made unintentional changes to a document or spreadsheet and you really want the version from 3 revisions ago.

Being able to share your files with others can be useful.

My Favorite Online Backup Program

I have found that to get a real picture of the value of a program, you very often can’t trust the review. They are out to make a sale. (To be honest, so am I but I will never recommend something that I don’t believe is true quality and if you ever find that I do, please bring it to my attention and I will correct the situation as soon as possible.)

Additionally, they don’t check for reports of problems. One should always do a search for <program> sucks, <program> complaints and <program> problems. This was my experience with BitDefender. I used to recommend it but I ran into some serious problems when I used it myself and a search of the web came up with all sorts of problems. You can get the details in my Bitdefender Problems post.

The most popular programs have some serious problems. This Carbonite review is chock full of strong complaints. The problems reported include BSOD’s in Vista, lack of response from customer support, failure to restore crucial files when needed, and being unavailable for restore for long periods.

Please note that I have been contacted by David Friend, CEO of Carbonite,  who indicates that the unfavorable review is over 2 years old and the reported issues have been corrected. While it is true that the article is from 2007, some of the complaints are from comments that are very recent. Hopefully, the bulk of the problems have been corrected.

Mozy also got rapped pretty hard in the blogosphere. A search of Mozy sucks will bring up a bunch of problem reports.

SOS was selected as an editor’s choice by PC Magazine. I also didn’t find any serious complaints about it. However, it’s quite expensive. The largest capacity that they offer for home users is 15 GB for about $50 a year. Their business offerings are much more expensive.

Idrive seems to be the best deal at this point. It was top rated in a number of reviews. I didn’t find any serious complaints about it. Although, it could use a bit more user friendliness but  you get 150 gigs for $50 a year.   Idrive is the best online backup solution.

Tags: backup, Carbonite, Idrive, Mozy, online backup, restore