The Best Online Backup Services

In a world where there is so much digital data being exchanged and stored backing up your computers data can easily be overlooked.  Let me just say this, backing up your data is so important!  I cannot stress it enough.  In this article, I’m going to share with you two excellent online backup services – Carbonite and Mozy.  Both services work on Windows and Mac.

Carbonite and Mozy offer very similar features and services.  Both provide “unlimited” backup space for your data and ensure that your data will be kept safe and encrypted on their servers.  The way the services work is you will install a piece of software onto your computer which will connect to their servers and transfer any/all data you tell it to.  By default, both programs are set to backup all of your data, however, you can further configure that to your liking if you wish.

Both services software offers bandwidth throttling which will keep the program from using up all of your bandwidth while it uploads your files to their servers. This is very useful when transferring several megabytes or gigabytes of data. The software also performs what is called incremental backup meaning it will only backup data that has been added, changed, edited, and/or modified since the previous backup. Incremental backups are very nice and definitely more efficient than backing up everything all over each time – it saves a lot of bandwidth on both ends (client and server).

Also each service will save multiple versions of your files, so if you accidentally overwrite/change a file you did not mean to and then don’t realize it for a couple of days, you can restore an older version(s) (previous to the edit) of the file without any hassles.

Carbonite is approximately $55/year. Mozy charges approximately $5/month. So the prices are comparable. Carbonite offers a completely free 15 day trial of their service to everyone. Mozy offers 2GB of free backup space on their servers to everyone. Feel free to try both and see which you like better. I like both services a lot. I think you’ll be pleased with either one you pick.

Have you tried Carbonite and/or Mozy? Let me know what you think! Leave a comment.