Top 5 online Backup services for your Mac
Ivan | Thu, 2010-06-24 22:07
If you keep your original and backup files in the same physical location you may lose them both at the same time because of theft, fire or other misfortune. It's a good idea to have an off-site backup for your files besides your local Time Machine disk.
If you have a fast internet connection, you can consider to get online backup as it is the easiest automated option. Here are the top 5 most recommended services.
Carbonite
Easy to use, automatic, no data limits, easy to restore files and costs $55 per year.
Jungle Disk
Similar to Carbonite in terms of ease of use and features, but requires an Amazon Web Services account. First 5GB is free. After that $2 per month plus storage fees with Amazon S3. Can be a good option if you already have S3.
Dropbox
It's probably the easiest to set-up and use, but the price can be quite high if you go above the free 2GB limit. 50GB costs $10 per month.
Mozy
If you get the mozyhome option it costs $5 per month or $104 per 2 years, but the features are limited. It's a good option if you only need a backup and nothing else. With mozypro you get all the other options that the previous three offer, but it costs $4 per month + $0.5 per GB.
CrashPlan
CrashPlan is unique because it offers backup to off-site locations, like your own office or your friends place for free. If you want to backup to their cloud servers it costs $100 per year for unlimited storage for one computer.
If you know of other good solutions, please do share!
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There's BackBlaze.
And don't forget the free Backup that is included with a MobileMe subscription. Works pretty well for me. I can back up to local, network, or cloud destinations with very efficient periodic (nightly for me) incrementals.
How "secure" are these online backup sources? The only thing that really has me shying away from an online backup solution is the possibility of their servers getting hacked and my information being stolen.
I like the free options. Another problem with any pay service might be that if you dont pay, you might also lose your data. I would think that the 5GB amount o space could help a creative keep some of their digital portfolio safe.
With most of the backup tools your data is encrypted before it is sent, so your data is safe, since you set the keys.
I tried Carbonite, Mozy and Crashplan. Crashplan was easily the best. The client app for the other systems was a CPU hog and caused fans to spin up constantly. (same can be said for SpiderOak).
With Crashplan you can specify CPU and bandwidth limits for 'idle' and 'in use' states too.
I got a deal with Crash plan that lets me backup all my computers for $5/month. The $100/year quoted in the article is a mistake. It should be $54/year.
Will
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http://www.macscan.net/
How would you compare using one of these backup services with MobileMe's iDisk? I know iDisk is limited in space - for a regular account, you get only 20GB storage. Would you call iDisk more of a file sharing/transferring solution than a backup solution?
Yeah, 20GB isn't enough, unless you're not backing up your picts, work and videos. Only docs and such.
You people better take advantage of this type stuff!
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