Why Online Backup?
Have you ever suffered from losing important documents, digital photos, videos etc due to hard disk crash of your cheap laptop? And then tried to salvage whatever you can using disk recovery programs? Most computer users would have faced such a situation some time or the other in their lives. According to an estimate about 140,000 hard disk crashes occur in US alone every week and about 10% of all hard drives fail each year all over the world.
With the advent of internet users have another problem to contend with: virus attacks that can virtually destroy entire files in the hard disk. A solution to these types of loss of data and also due to thefts and natural disasters is online backup. With communication costs coming down by the day, it is cheaper and convenient to save your data periodically using online backup service providers. They provide cheap, safe and secure remote location for your data that can be accessed from your cheap laptop anywhere wherever there is an internet connection. You only need to pay as low as one cent per megabyte per month for the first gigabyte and 0.3 cents in excess of 1GB or $5 per month for unlimited storage for the online backup facility!
There are hundreds of websites like Keepit.com, Mozy.com, PCWorld.co.uk, IDrive, StorageGuardian etc. that provide online backup service. We look at Mozy.com and PCWorld’s online backup facility here. A fast internet connection is mandatory when backing up large amounts of data regularly.
Berkeley Data Systems provides two types of online backup service through Mozy for personal use and MozyPro for business use. They support Windows (2000, XP, 2003, and Vista, including servers) and Mac OS X (10.4 and 10.5, desktop and server) operating systems. It has versatile software and the costs are as low as $5 per month per computer with unlimited storage under MozyHome plan. MozyPro supports server backups for Windows Server 2000 & 2003 in addition to the operating systems mentioned above. MozyPro requires a license for each PC costing $3.95 per month in addition to storage costs of 50 cents per GB per month with a minimum of 2GB storage. For beginners, Mozy.com provides free storage of up to 2GB for which a simple registration is all that is needed.
PC World provides online backup service through its website, the actual service being provided by Spare Backup, Inc. through its distributor for Europe, DSG Retail Ltd. Users can try the service free for 14 days and they will be charged on a monthly basis after the free trial. It costs $60(£37) for 50GB per year for single PC while there is a family pack that costs $200 (£125) for 200GB per year and 2 to 5 users. Corporate users have to pay prices varying from $200 to $600 per year for storage space varying from 200GB to 750 GB for up to 10 PCs. There are different plans for different no. of users and duration.
