Online Backup Services

I'm a good little geek and make regular backups and image files to a NAS, external HDD, and DVD-R. I also supplement them with online backup.

Well, I've been a freeloader on the IDrive online backup service for about six months. They offer 2GB free (or 12GB free if you let them raid your address book), and I've successfully restored countless files from them. In one case, they really saved my bacon.

Anyway, to get to the point: I feel like I should start supporting them by signing up for their paid services. Before I do that, however, I'd like to know if anybody here has any good or bad experiences with IDrive or any of the other online backup services?

you can get 5GB free from windows live skydrive.

kword88 said:

you can get 5GB free from windows live skydrive.

I have a skydrive account and use it for sharing photos and documents with family members. Even in these days of ubiquitous high-speed internet, I still hate sending large files through email.

The issues I have with skydrive is the speed - or lack of it - when uploading and reliability. I've mapped skydrive so I can use it as a backup destination, but it seems to lose connection often, sometimes while accessing it. It's just been too unreliable for me.

Almost like MS knows I'm doing something that skydrive was never intended for.

I think Big Brother Bill is watching me!

kword88 said:

you can get 5GB free from windows live skydrive.

Hi there

5GB is TINY these days -- This is the problem with Online Backup services
1) the amount on offer is FAR too small -- even a typical W7 partition is around 25 GB. A typical Camera card has 2GB just for a few photos.

2) A lot of Internet providers are capping stuff so once you start wanting to up / download large volumes of data then you are going to be involved in a lot of EXTRA expense. -- The days of Unlimited Bandwidth unfortunately in these days of every company looking for the last extra drop of revenue they can squeeze out of consumers are nearly over

3) I doubt that their security is all that I would wish for -- anything can get hacked and just imagine what pleasure some warped mind would get by mounting a Denial of Service attack on a large online backup provider who was providing backup to 1000's of customers.

No thanks --this is one development I Shall definitely NOT be using.

Cheers
jimbo

I use sendspace for sharing with friends and gmail (not gdrive) for backing up.