Mozy Remote Backup give you 2GB of free online and secure backup. When you sign up for the service, you then download a client that automatically backups folder you specify. There is currently only a Windows client, but Mozy promises a Mac client is on the way. What happens when you exceed 2GB? Well you can upgrade your account to a paid account that gives you a whopping 30GB of storage for only $4.95 per month!
UPDATE: The service is advertised as free storage, but they do send you a weekly email with links to relevant sponsors. Still, it seems like a small price to pay.
I’m a little tired of all these glowing reviews of such an unimaginative software. This guy hits the nail on the head.
Most people have focused too much on the amount of free storage. This is a big mistake. Unfortunately, even some experts also made such mistakes, incl. PC Magazines (and myself, initially…), etc.
Online storage is very different from hard disks. All hard disks are essentially the same. However, online storage services are very different. For example:
some people feel Gmail is online storage; in reality, it is not. Gmail is email, just like Outlook is not storage, it doesn’t have a real file/folder concept, and the attachment file size is generally limited to less than 10MB.
Yahoo’s briefcase has been around for a long time, but it’s just plainly not very usable.
XDrive used to be the largest one (and the best?), but the service has degraded a lot over the years, and it is getting worse after AOL acquired it; of course AOL always does stupid things.
Box.net and streamload.com don’t have good client software, very hard to upload / download many files.
FilesAnywhere has some good stuff only if you like their UI.
Clearly it doesn’t make sense to just compare amount of free storage. E.g. both DriveHQ and Box.net offers 1GB free storage. However, I choose DriveHQ because DriveHQ has way more features than Box.net. DriveHQ FileManager and WWWBackup are awesome. Box.net also claims to offer backup service, but that’s misleading — without an automatic backup tool, it is not a real backup, it’s just upload, or storage.
I was attracted by Streamload for it’s generous free storage offering. 25GB free storage! But when I actually tried to upload a 1GB video file, I immediately realized their upload tool sucks. Then I noticed the bandwidth limit… and ehh, DriveHQ also has this limit. After a moment of thinking, it makes sense to me: there is no free lunch. Companies spend money and offer good services should at least get their cost covered. You think you are getting something for free, it’s not…either it’s bad, broken, or they can change the terms and force you to pay later. When most companies are charging $40 for 5GB, offering 25GB for free is suspicious, unless the company has a deep pocket like google.
The worst things are:
To be forced to pay later,
The company went out of business.
Who knows? if they don’t make money, they will be out of business eventually. and the most risky part is: it is said at least 90% of online storage / backup companies will be out of business in 1-2 years. It is clear to me that the most important criteria is to choose a company that has a viable business, has services that differetiate from others. DriveHQ seems to meet these criteria, and StreamLoad not.
For a secure, fast and reliable backups of all your important files and folders you can take a look at IBackup (www.ibackup.com). None other than PC World recently rated IBackup as the `best all-around’ service’ in a review of online backup services.
You can do quick and safe backups of files (including open files) and folders with IBackup for Windows. Most importantly, IBackup accounts are compatible with most FTP clients on most platforms providing a powerful flexible tool to transfer files. It has multiple subscription plans that suit a wide variety of users. IBackup for Windows are compatible with Windows 98 and above.
You can easily restore files from the ‘Snapshots’ of files maintained in your IBackup account. IDrive (www.ibackup.com/IBDrive_new.htm) you can map your online IBackup account as a network drive on your computer. You can then drag and drop files to the IBackup account from the Windows explorer. It also allows you to open and save files stored in your IBackup online account directly from their associated applications like Microsoft Office.
Manage your multimedia files with ‘IDrive Multimedia’. On double-clicking on a multimedia file, it will open up your media player and starts playing instantaneously. You can even create ‘playlists’ or do ‘shuffle’ using your favorite media player pointing to IDrive’s media files. Streaming of video files is also instantaneous. You can even use advanced functions such as fast-forward with near instant response.
For added security, you can use http://www.ibackup.com/professional (IBackup Professional) whose encryption is based on a user-defined key so that the data stored on IBackup Professional servers cannot be decrypted by anybody other than you. You can also restore up to 30 prior versions of files backed up, including the most recent version of the data
I know there is another italian on line back up company, Memopal(www.memopal.com) that offers 5Gb free. You should ask the code to download the softwere in the contacts.