Backing up information on your computer is more important than ever.  We get a fair share of customers who come in with tears in their eyes asking if we can recover their data from a broken hard drive or corrupted drive.  We can do surface level scanning to retrieve old data but once a hard drive is physical broken or massively corrupted, there isn’t much to do unless we send it off to our partners at Drivesavers.  (www.drivesavers.com) .   Drivesavers is excellent and does an amazing job but remember, they aren’t cheap.  But if you lose lifetime pictures or financial documents etc, is there ever a fair price to pay?  Hard drives always crash, viruses corrupt data, information gets lost.  Remember, every year over 53% of computer users lose their precious data.  Are you protected? 

But how did it get this bad?  As a RoadRunner customer, you have endless resources and most of the best ones are free!  (including the one you get from RoadRunner!)  Lets go ahead and take a look at the four most common online backup solutions.  Depending on what you are going to do with this data (share it, back it up or store it), there are different services out there.  Check these out.

Box.net
Box.net is a good source for online backup storage.  There is no client to download so all you have to do is go to their website and go straight into their application online and go for it.  In a nut shell, you get up to 1GB of free storage, public file sharing, up to 5 collaboration files and a few more goodies.  There is a pay version too if you want to increase the amount that you want to back up as well.  From $9.95/month, you get to increase your storage space to 5GB. You also get to store bigger folders too!  As far as I know, there is no client to download so it makes it a little bit easier. The encryption is tight on this one too.  Same type as what the banks use.

Mozy.com
If you are a home user, this is a great option as well.  Home users can get up to 2GB of free data backed up.  They have some features on here too.  You sign up for the home service, download their software, select which files to be backed up, and you tell it when to back up your computer.  So if you know that the computer will be turned on while you are having dinner, you schedule for a backup daily at 630pm.  It only backs up what you have recently changed or added in the designated files/folders.  Also has the same type of encryption used by banks!  If you need to increase the amount to backup, go to the MOZY business section.  For about $.50/gb and a flat price on desktop or server licenses, you can have the same level of protection at a fraction of the cost of recovering damaged data! One cool thing to note about MOZY that the other online services don’t provide… There is a restore function on here.  This can be VERY helpful. And if you really get lazy?  Get in touch with customer service and they will send everything you have backed up on a CD!  Of course there is a charge but how convenient!  Just to remind you though, this is NOT an archive service so if you ever delete a file from your PC, consider it gone online at MOZY too.

Carbonite.com
Are you a Star Wars fan?  Do you remember what Jabba the Hut encased Han Solo in when Han was captured?  You guessed it.  Carbonite.  This service is non nonsense and arguably the easiest one to use.  There is a synch feature and this is helpful when you forget if a file has been backed up or not.  The synch feature isn’t near instant like on Mozy but mostly within an hour, it will backup whatever document you saved.  Carbonite does have a trial period that you can try out to see if it is best for you.  But for about $50/ year, you have solid backup protection.

RoadRunner online storage
Roadrunner customers all qualify for free storage online as well.  Did you know that?  All you have to do is go to https://safestorage.rr.com/ and sign in with your account info and you get 500mb of free storage space available just for you as a valued customer!  Take advantage of this.  If you need more space than that, go ahead and give them a call!  No wonder they are Hawaii’s largest ISP!

So what level of protection?

Hands down the easiest to use is Carbonite.  Box.net is also fairly easy to use but not as sophisticated.  I wrote the most about mozy but that could be because I Have used their service the most.  I liked carbonite too since it is no non sense and easy to use.  In fact, it was the easiest to use and easily identified which files I hadn’t backed up yet. 

As with anything else, it comes down to the level of experience and comfort you have working on the web with your PC.  If you are pretty comfortable and have a lot of use for an online storage, carbonite might be your best option.  There is a price to pay but its still pretty small.   I have uploaded over 5GB to my carbonite account and its rock solid.  When I wanted to get rid of some incriminating pictures from a party Sherman threw for me, I deleted it off of my PC and WHAM, gone for good on Carbonite too. ( Oh, by the way, thanks Sherm!  That party on the 8th floor rocked!)  But go ahead and try them out and see where your comfort level is!  After all, some online back up is much better than none.

Just remember that there is never enough protection.  Having an online solution is nice but if you ever need to get to your data nice and quick, then it would almost certainly be involving an external Hard drive too.  There are a bunch of those out there like BUFFALO Mini stations, Western Digital Passports and whole bunch out there.  You can get them for as low as $80 bucks at Costco and slap it into your USB and you are good to go.  Some have neat features like a one touch backup and that’s also really helpful. 

For the record, I have an online back up solution for my pictures and priceless moments and I have an external that I religiously back up to for my personal laptop at home.  When I am in the office, everything is backed up three times from our server to tape drives to RAID drives.  Is your office backed up properly?  Are YOU using the right level of protection?

NOTE: I know I mentioned BlackFriday last month but for the most part, Black Friday seems to be a bunch of NOTHING.  I have been scouring some of the online ads for Black Friday specials and ever since Circuit City and COMPUSA went out of business, nothing too great unless you want toys for sale cheap at Walmart (but aren’t they already cheap?).  This is why I decided to go with talking about back up!