SpiderOak, whom we reviewed extensively, is offering a deal that’s hard to pass up – 40% off! That is just $5 per month for a 100 GB account.
But this deal is only good from 10AM to 10PM EST today, June 30th. Use the promotion code recovery2
during your upgrade from free account or when you make your initial purchase.
If you’re backing up your computer with IBackup, you can now stream your MP3 collection, wherever you are. IBackup’s Media Gallery shows your backed up media files (like mp3, mp2, mov, mpeg, mpga, mpg, mpe, wav, avi, aif, aiff, au, midi, asf, wmv, wma) and gives you the option to stream them online. This means you can backup your MP3 collection from home to IBackup, then stream it to your computer in the office.
IBackup’s Media Gallery also supports streaming of video files, as well as photo galleries automatically created from your GIF, JPG, or TIFF digital photos.
With IBackup’s sharing capabilities, you can share your vacation photos, or use the slideshow to share images in a presentation.
With these new features, it’s time for us to update our IBackup review.
One of the biggest roadblocks to online backups is the initial backup. Uploading gigs of data can take days, if not weeks! However, once the initial backup set is complete, the incremental backups typically take just minutes.
How long is your initial backup going to take? Just ask Wolfram|Alpha. Enter how much data you need to backup (ex: 35 GB), your data rate (check your rate at speedtest.net – I get 4.97 Mb/s) and Wolfram|Alpha will tell you how long the initial backup should take (assuming you’re getting full upload speed the entire time). In my case, it’s
56 338 seconds
0.6521 days
15.65 hours
939 minutes
You could figure this out yourself, but why bother, when Wolfram|Alpha makes this tool available to you?
Further proof the online backup market is becoming more and more fierce, SpiderOak recently issued a press release comparing their service to DropBox, full of completely valid and compelling facts.
For instance, SpiderOak users choose which folders to sync, while DropBox users must save their files in a specific location. So keeping your file structure the way you want it organized is one benefit of using SpiderOak over DropBox.
Next, SpiderOak doesn’t have to sync all files, just like DropBox. However, SpiderOak does have a “backup-only” option for specified directories, so they’ll be regularly backed up to “the cloud”, but won’t be sync’d amongst multiple computers. DropBox lacks this option, so if you want to backup a file with DropBox, you’re forced to sync it, using up storage space on the sync’d machines and bandwidth amongst them.
Aside from other SpiderOak features, such as the ability to sync and backup external drives, SpiderOak is also more affordable. A 100GB account with SpiderOak costs $100 / year, while $100 / year with DropBox will only get you half the storage space. As if twice the storage space and additional features weren’t enough, you can save 25% on SpiderOak using at SpiderOak Promotion Code.
So while SpiderOak went on the offensive this week, they have some valid points. Look for our review of DropBox in the near future.
We just recently posted our SugarSync review, and liked what we saw. At the time, there was rumors they were working on some interactive, social features; these features have just been released to the general public.
SugarSync is a great tool for backing up photos (along with all those other important files on your computer) and previously, you could share your photos with others using SugarSync’s digital photo albums.
SugarSync not only backs up your photos, but also creates online galleries for you to share with your friends. No longer do you have to backup your photos to one spot, and upload them again somewhere else to share them.
However, if you wanted to share your photos on Facebook, you’d have to upload them twice (once to SugarSync, and once to Facebook). That second step has now been eliminated, as now you can upload your photos directly from SugarSync to Facebook.
Also announced is an improvement to file collaboration. Now you can easily share files with anyone in your Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, or Yahoo e-mail account.
SugarSync is clearly a leader in online backup innovation and we can’t wait to see what else they have in store.
This weekend, we’re celebrating the Dads in our lives, but we can never forget about our Moms, and neither can Mozy.
To help spread the word about how great Mozy is, they’re giving away free t-shirts! Just about anyone is eligible… here’s what you have to do:
There are thousands of digital photos on many computers, just waiting for a hard drive failure, to be destroyed forever. With a free, 2GB Mozy account, you can safely backup about 650 of them. If you have more, and most of us do, you can backup all of your photos (and mp3s, and financial documents, and whatever else you may have) with an unlimited MozyHome account.
HP, after dumping their own online backup service, Upline, has partnered with Symantec to protect the data on new PCs.
However, don’t get all excited yet: the version of Symantec Online Backup is merely a 1-month trial, after which users will be asked to pay $50 / year. That’s nothing special: you can get a 30-day trial free directly from Symantec.
The pre-installation of Symantec Online Backup extends the current HP / Symantec agreement, in which HP computers feature Symantec’s Norton Internet Security.
While some consumers welcome pre-installed software, adding credibility to the product selection and ease of use (installation is already taken care of), others find it to be a waste of space, system resources, and a major annoyance as it regularly prompts users to purchase a license.
IBackup recently announced a new offering for small and medium businesses (SMBs) for long term archiving, which helps companies in certain industries meet archive compliance and regulatory requirements.
Using customized snapshots technology, data which was previously available from 10 to 30 days ago can now be recalled from many years back.
Previously, such technology was exclusive to companies using storage systems from IBM or Decho (Mozy’s parent company). Now companies can get similar functionality for a fraction of the cost.
The new product offering is available immediately for Windows, Mac and Linux systems.
URL-shortening service Cligs found themselves the victim of Canadian cyber-terrorism as a malicious attacker changed all of the destination URLs to a single location.
Fortunately for Cligs, they had backups of their data! Way to go!
Unfortunately, the backups had been turned off since early May, “for some unknown reason” 
Backing up your data is only good if you keep those backups up-to-date! If you’re backing up your desktop with Carbonite and a backup doesn’t happen for a few days, you’ll get a reminder e-mail. Mozy, like IBackup, tells you when a backup was successfully completed, but not when there’s an error (Mozy will pop-up on your computer, IBackup can send you an email). Personally, I’d rather know when something goes wrong, rather than every time something works (it’s supposed to work every time!).
It’s been 4 hours since my backups last ran, but prior to that, it was 6 days – oops! Good thing I caught it. When’s the last time your backup successfully ran?
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about what exactly is a “backup” of data, and how does a “copy” differ from a “backup”. Channel Register posted a recap of the discussion in, “Storage world asks: Is a copy a backup?”
There’s a lot of nitpicking going on, but some key points are:
P. Lee commented on Channel Register’s story by saying, A backup is defined by intent, not format or medium.
Well said, P. Lee. For instance, taking your child’s favorite DVD and making a backup of it (while still illegal) has a much different intent than making a copies of it and handing them out.
Following P. Lee’s argument, Joshua Goodall chimes in: what matters isn’t that a copy is made. What matters is what you want to do with it afterwards.
This also follows the rationale that once a copy of the data is made, it should be organized and saved to another device, preferably off site.
Part of the discussion about backups revolves around the format of the backup. Some argue it should be in a different format, while others say the same format. Why does this matter? Well long ago, when storage wasn’t that affordable, Unix systems packaged up data and compressed it before backing it up for efficiency and storage considerations. Carter George recognizes, Great for backup vendors, not so great for users.
Scott Waterhouse, an employee of EMC (Mozy’s parent company) concludes,
You can have a backup only. You can have a backup and a copy. But you can’t have a copy only.
So are you backing up your data, or just making a copy?
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