Put A Byte Aside For A Rainy Day

Newcastle Herald

Thursday October 30, 2008

THE people most vigilant about backing up data are those who have lost data.

Large corporate IT strategies can afford to store their backups away from the office so if the office is destroyed the data can be recovered. But most of us can't afford to have someone collect our daily or weekly backups from home and store them securely.

Fortunately, there are alternatives such as online services that let you store your data on a server that can be accessed over the internet.

This provides assurance that your data is safe should your computer suffer a catastrophe.

It also means your data is accessible to you from anywhere on the internet.

Travellers who store their data online are protected if their laptop meets with an unfortunate accident, and if their email provider limits the size of files that can attach to messages an online service can act as a centralised repository of documents for clients, colleagues, family and friends.

Choosing an online storage service requires balancing several factors.

How much data will you be storing online?

Computers that store hundreds of gigabytes of data are commonplace, so it's probably not practical to store the entire contents of your hard drive on an online service.

But you will want to protect all your critical personal data, so you'll need at least that much space plus room to grow; one and a half times as much space as you're currently using is a reasonable minimum.

Performance is another factor. Most of these services are located overseas and their network performance can be variable.

It should be fast enough to not interfere with your normal work flow.

The first time you use the service you'll probably be copying a large volume of data, which you might expect to take a few hours but with a slow service could take days.

Also, if you use a mixture of Macs, PCs or Linux systems, you'll want to look at services that support multiple platforms.

This is also important if you're planning to use online storage as a way of sharing files with clients or friends and they use different operating systems.

The verdict

It comes down to value for money and performance. For that reason, we prefer Xdrive. Mozy made the task of remote backups easy but we liked the flexibility of Xdrive and the way it appeared in Windows Explorer as a local network drive. Dead easy, and free access to 5 GB of storage.

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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