Five tips for evaluating Online Backup
I've spent a lot of time looking at different backup products. Here are 5 tips for finding the right online backup service for your needs.
- Pick the right flavor.
There are three main approaches to online backup:
Social Backup (i.e. Cucku Backup) stores your files with a friend, family member or second PC that you own. With social backup you can backup or restore in person, providing speed when you need it. Cucku Backup includes full local backup as well as remote backup.
Anonymous Peer-to-Peer (i.e. Allmydata, Wuala) is decentralized like social backup but makes use of free space throughout the network. This has the advantage that you don't need a backup partner to be online. The drawback is that many copies of your backup need to be uploaded and there's no way to restore quickly as you don't know where your data is stored.
Traditional Online Backup (i.e. Carbonite, Mozy) hosts your backup in a datacenter. While the cost of storage and bandwidth continues to fall it still isn't free, so traditional online backup is more expensive than social backup or anonymous p2p. There have also been many high-profile failures, see Bill's post Recession squeezes online storage.
- Test the restore process.
Too many people wait until they're in trouble before trying to restore files. I was a victim of this when I needed to use a recovery disc for a laptop last year. Before you commit to using a product try backing up a few files you don't care about, delete them and then see if you can get them back. If you can't figure out how, or can't get them back quickly then you need a different product. For extra credit try to restore the files on a different computer so you know what to do if your computer is stolen and you need to recover all of your files.
- Find out what happens to deleted files.
Imagine you discover that you accidentally deleted a folder that you needed a month ago. You can recover from your backup, right? With many providers the answer is no, and you'll discover that "backup" and "archive" are considered to be different services. Make sure you understand how long deleted files will be stored and also how many versions of a file are available for restore. Cucku keeps deleted files and every version of every file that you've backed up.
- Check for limits on what you can include in the backup.
Some products will exclude some types of files, or won't allow you to backup from external hard drives or network locations. Even if all your files are on one hard drive now you may decide to move some of your data to an external drive or network attached storage device (NAS) in the future. Cucku allows you to backup from local, external and network drives and there is no restriction on the types of file that you can include in your backup.
- Make sure you have both belt and braces.
Is there a backup of your backup? Many online backup companies have a single datacenter. While it's much less likely that this will fail than your computer it's still a single point of failure. Cucku provides the best of both worlds with a local backup and a remote backup. Store the local backup on an external hard drive and you can quickly recover from day to day problems or even a drive crash. The remote backup is there so that in the worst case scenario you know that you can always get your data back.
posted by Rob on Saturday, March 14, 2009
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