Approaching the end of another year, perhaps you’ve not had the time to think about the security of your data. Too often many of us simply rely on our physical hard drive space, unaware that if something happened one of two things would happen. First you’d either lose all of your data and have to start over, or secondly, you’d have to pay a hefty price to have the data scraped from the hard drive and placed on another hard drive or DVD. It’s a frustrating experience that I’ve been through a few times and I’m sure a lot of you out there can relate.
Since those times I’ve become a huge supporter of cloud storage, a place offsite that is safe from anything affecting my physical computer. Backing up my files is useful especially if you’ve got data that you cherish. It could be anything from important work documents to cherished family photos. Having a backup is vital is you want to ensure the longevity of your information and the team here at Crenk will share the top 4 online backups that you might want to consider as a new years resolution.
Yesterday I had a big panic and thought that I had lost several files on my computer. However, I was lucky enough to have them all fully backed up online. Here are some of our favourite free backup services online and software. Enjoy!
Mozy
The above tools are handy for running hard drive backups to another partition, external drives or your own FTP server. However if you want to backup only a handful of files and store them on reliable third party servers then you can try a free online backup service called Mozy. It’s quick to configure, fully automated and available both for Mac and Windows PCs. The only problem is that the free account gives you only 2 GB of storage space.
DropBox
An even better alternative is DropBox, however since it’s still in beta, you will have to wait for the next round of invites before you can get in. With DropBox you’re also able to access your files from other PCs, keep them synchronized across multiple computers and even keep a detailed log of all changes made to the file and restore it to an earlier version. Quite useful for people who work from multiple locations.
Comodo Backup
Comodo Backup is an excellent backup utility from the creators of Comodo Firewall. It’s free, easy to use and have everything you might need. You can easily backup your local files and folders to anywhere on your computer, network, DVD / CD or even FTP server. Plus it can be set to run automatically on specified time intervals.
Comodo has different backup modes: copy, move and synchronization. So apart from simply copying/moving the files from one place to another you can set Comodo to keep source and backup copy synchronized. That is to say, whenever you make some changes to the original files the changes will be replicated on your backup copy.
There are plenty of other cool features including rule-based file filtering, incremental backups, backup scheduling, backup archiving and email notifications.
Hinx Backup Easy
Hinx Backup Easy doesn’t have that many features as the one above but if you’re looking for a simple automated backup tool it’s a worthy candidate. Similar to Comodo, Backup Easy also allows you to backup files to a local drive or FTP server. There is also a scheduler to run backups on a regular basis. Backup Easy can do both full and incremental backups. In the latter case, it runs full backup only once, every backup afterwards just changes the files that were modified since last backup.
The program can run on all Java-supported systems. If you’re on Windows, simply download the installer and run it. The installation is automatic. For OS’s other than Windows, download the file, unzip it, and run the executable jar file.
SyncBack
SyncBack – Basically, it’s another backup software. Although the app has both free and paid versions, the free one has enough features for running local backups.
It has been already reported by the big boys (Techcrunch and Mashable) that Online Storage company Mozy has been acquired by EMC Corporation. Mozy is reported to have nearly $40 billion market cap. According to two sources close to the deal the price is $76 million.
Mozy raised $1.9 million in capital, which was led by Wasatch Ventures, so this seems to be a very good exit for Mozy. In contrast major competitor Carbonite has raised $21 million in VC funding, so they might be a little pushed to match this kind of exit on capital.
