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A good backup strategy is important, especially if you have personal or business data on your computer, like photos, videos or other documents, that can’t simply be downloaded from the internet again. Files that are accidently deleted, overwritten, or infected by a virus can be easily restored.

There are many possibilities for backing up data like external hard drives, dvds, network computers. In this article I want to show you two online backup services, that I tried. The great advantage of online backup is the safety of your data, even in case of a fire in your house. The greatest disadvantage is the limited data transfer rate to the internet.

Mozy

I used Mozy for about a year, and I was quite happy with it. You pay around 5$ per month and get unlimited online storage for a single computer. I had about 160GB of data on the mozy servers. The client software however had its problems. I quite regularly had the problem, that backups didn’t complete, showing me variuous error messages. A very annoying one was ServerError12, which prevented backups from running over several weeks. Mozy support couldn’t get it managed, and all of a sudden, it worked again, they were as surprised as I was.

Data restore turned out to be a real problem. There are two possibilities

• Web Restore – In Theory: you log in to mozy.com, select Web Restore, select the desired files, and dowlnoad them. In Practice: You click “Web Restore” , wait 5 minutes, get an error message. You do that about 5 times, until you really get a list of your files. Here, the desired file is not available. Ok, that might have been an exception, but it was the case for me.
• Client Restore – The mozy client needs to be installed for this. In the client, you can select and restore your files. You can as well access you files via an icon in my computer. This basically works, but here as well, there is a problem. You can only have one computer in your mozy account without paying extra fees. If you want to access your backup data from a friends computer, and you want to install the client there, you would have to replace your computer in your account, in order to access your data.

Conclusion: I could not access my desired file.

Another disadvantage of mozy: files that are deleted on your computer are deleted from the mozy servers as well after 30 days. If you accidently delete a file, and only notice after two months, your data is gone.

Crashplan

Crashplan is a quite sophisticated backup software. Online backup is just a small part here. For personal use, Crashplan is free. You can define various backup destinations:

• Other computers within your account. Each computer, that has the Crashplan client installed with the same account can be automatically used as a backup destination over LAN or internet. (free)
• Computer of a friend with a different Crashplan account (over internet, free)
• Any folder on your computer, like an internal or external hard drive (free)
• Online-Backup (unlimited to CrashPlanCentral) ($54 per year, discounts for longer periods)

Restoring data works very well. Indeed, web restore is only available in CrashPlan+ which costs again, but restoring via the client works all the better. You can install it on any computer, and temporarily add this computer to your account for free. Then you can select the files from any of your computers, and restore them from the Crashplan servers. The client handling is much more fluent and smooth than in mozy. The temporarily added computer can be removed from your account afterwards.

Also, the 30 day limit doesn’ exist with Crashplan. Files that are deleted from your computer are kept forever on the Crashplan Servers.

Security

With both providers, it is possible and reccomended to encrypt your data with your own custom key. Like this, you can be (reasonably) sure, that the provider, or your friend, on whose computer you store your data, cannot access them.

Summary

By now, I am a happy Crashplan customer. The free software, many computers per account, free and fast backup between the computers, reasonably priced and reliable online backup, and the generally smooth client convinced me to cancel my mozy subscription. If you want to try Crashplan, just download the software for free. You can even use the CrashplanCentral unlimited online backup for 30 days free of charge.