There are basically four deal breakers that you have when it comes to any online backup service and solution. We grade these services by a measure of their features, file sharing capabilities, the support that they offer, and of course, the price points that the companies offer. Our overall scores are an aggregate and average of those four dimensions of any online backup solution, so in order to get the most out our site, it’ll pay to read on, about what to look for with regards to each point, and we’ll even recommend a few services along the points that you want to focus on.

With a product and service that performs well overall, what you’re going to get isn’t an experience that necessarily stands out by any one of the four pieces to online backups that we grade by; instead, you’ll get a service that performs well, more or less, in each category, but not necessarily the best. So that’s one thing to keep in mind with a product that’s good, on average: the experience, for you, may not be a standout by any one of the four dimensions to online backups.

What we currently recommend as a good overall backup service is LiveDrive. When it comes to the quality and breadth in the features that the company offers in its products and services, LiveDrive does well enough. Unlike some of the services that we reviewed that made for the best backup product, except for the fact that they did nothing at all with File Sharing, what you’re getting with LiveDrive is a product that does what all of the other guys do, fairly well. When you factor in its File Sharing capabilities, and compare that against what the company offers in the way of Support and the prices that their products range, what you get with LiveDrive is a product that performs well at the median.

ElephantDrive – Best Online Backup Service – Features

The reason why we separate out Features from File Sharing as a score is in order to address the growing prominence that social networking and workplace collaboration is having on businesses, amongst networks of friends, and even strangers that, although don’t know each other, share a common interest. For this reason, we’re going over Features separately. And this is where we stand about what we feel is the standout backup service when it comes to features: ElephantDrive.

With ElephantDrive you simply have a higher number of features than any of the other services that we’ve reviewed thus far on this site. It’s the only backup service that you’ll find on the web that really goes out of its way to promote its photo sharing capabilities, and is one of the things that drew us in, in the beginning. What you can do within this set of features is you can upload directly to social media and social networking sites; something other sites just don’t offer about their photo sharing and backup capabilities. But that’s toeing into that File Sharing piece of overall scoring, so here’s the quick and dirty breakdown of the features we feel make the ElephantDrive a standout, when and where features are considered:

•    Drag drop interface; you don’t have to click, click, click, type… to get your files uploaded; just drag drop. Simple
•    For slower connections and backing up en masse, the service offers its users the option of mailing in a DVD, an internal drive, or a USB jump drive.
•    Another feature we saw as really indispensable, a feature we’re not sure why more of the other services out there don’t offer, is the ability to import your data from other online storage services. You might not have the data you want to backup on a drive or any other computer; it may already be in the cloud. So this is definitely helpful.
•    Many of the services we’ve reviewed offer multiple computer backups per single accounts, but none offer an unlimited number computers; ElephantDrive does, no strings attached. Amazing.

MyOtherDrive – Best Online Backup Service – File Sharing

Okay, the fun score; perhaps the score most of you will be interested in. With social networking sites making for the largest subscriber and user bases on the web, what we’re finding is that File Sharing is a class of features that’s fast growing to be a huge set of functions that’s just exploding not only within the backup and storage cloud solutions set, but the rest of the categories of cloud services out there. Going forward, file sharing and collaboration: these will be requisite categories of functions for any site, and interoperability the objective du jour.

The service to out-perform and truly standout from the rest of the pack, amongst all of the online backup services that we’ve reviewed and tested so far is: MyOtherDrive.

And here’s the quick and dirty list of reasons why (read the full review for a more in-depth explanation of how it scored in the other areas):
•    You don’t get as many permissions features with the rest of the online backup services as you do with MyOtherDrive. You can set up per file, or per folder, or even per workspace permissions; set up rules about those permissions, and quickly click a general permission such as classifying the folder or file as: Public, (what they’re calling) “Friend,” and “Password Based Sharing.”
•    Public Sharing: this is the File Sharing feature that puts the service over the top, from being a mere online backup solution to being a full fledged serving and sharing services website. Basically, you can turn your archive into a photo, video, and other sort of media sharing server with this offering’s Public Sharing set of features and functions.
•    Secure Links: we don’t see this with very many online backup solutions. You post a file to the web; it’s accessible via a public URL, but in order to actually view the page, you’ll have to enter a password. This is handy when you want to post the URL to folks you want to share with publicly, but keep unwanted users out by only privately distributing the password. We found this to be super useful while working on projects with team members who were on the road a bunch, and had to use public computers and their mobiles to get to files that we were all working on.
•    Online albums: sure, other services out there provide online albums, but none of them integrate with all of the major social networking sites quite as neatly and smoothly as MyOtherDrive. Incredibly useful in this day and age, where seeing it on a social networking page is believing it.
•    Grab File: amazing, while you’re perusing the web, and you stumble upon a cool video or photo, you can “grab the file” over to your MyOtherDrive account, then serve up to your friends.
•    And with MyOtherDrive, you also have this function where you can trade files with other MyOtherDrive users. In other words, you can save files from one account, to another. This is useful when it comes to storing a copy of something that was shared with you on your own MyOtherDrive “drive.”

Mozy – Best Online Backup Service – Support

You can really tell a good deal about a firm, any firm, any office really, by the quality of operations at the front desk. If you walk into a lawyer’s office, and the front desk clerk’s frazzled, disorganized, and scattered, you wouldn’t be very impressed, now would you. Same goes for cloud services. You can’t really expect very much of a service that doesn’t offer much in the way of support, so there’s the idea amongst critics in the tech sector, that you can actually judge a book by its cover, i.e. a cloud service by the quality of support that the firm offers up. And in this area, where you’ll find you have the highest level and quality of support is with Mozy.

With Mozy, you get a full on Support Portal, equipped with the standard features of a support site and content system, but with some added, and quite essential bells and whistles. But first, the standard set of support features are there:

•    Knowledge base
•    FAQ
•    And some way to communicate with a support staff or personnel with Mozy

Where it gets sort of luxurious even is in the ways that you can help yourself. They put up a number of very high quality manuals, the sort of texts you’d actually have to buy for office productivity suites at bookstores. They also provide a number of tutorial, step-by-step videos for new users, to help walk relative luddites through the more rudimentary functions of the service.
But where we saw Mozy really shine was in the Mozy staff and peer user forums, what the Portal’s calling “Community.” There, you’ll find Mozy staff updating forums and message boards, a lot like you see with a number of Fortune 500 software firms; you really don’t get this level of support with cloud services, most of which are fly by night operations that don’t have the budgets for a full time support staff (or even the budgets to outsource that function).

So if you generally find that you’re needing to work with support when it comes to consumer tech and gadgets in general, Mozy might be the best option for you to test drive for a few months, since support there is so strong.

4Shared Premium – Best Priced Online Backup Service

The point about an online backup service, boils down to a few ratios. One is, how much storage capacity can you get per dollar? Of course, this is a case where more is actually more. There’s nothing special about storage capacity; there aren’t invisible strings wherein the case might somehow be that you’re allowed 1 gig of storage, but don’t actually get that, or actually get more; it is what it is. If you upload 1GB movie file, and your storage limit is 1GB, then you’ll hit that quota with one upload. Simple.

The next ratio has to do with bandwidth. A lot of the services out there either throttle bandwidth (meaning, during peak hours, they lower the speed at which you’re allowed to transfer data to and from the company’s servers) or they meter bandwidth. With metering, what happens is the company charges a different (i.e. higher rate) for faster transmission speeds, i.e. for more bandwidth. Again, price is simple: with bandwidth you simply want the most for the buck.

And then the last thing is price point. At what prices do the services and products that a company offers range? Price serves to keep users from utilizing the service that the company offers; i.e. if the higher the price, the harder it is going to be for a consumer to use the product. So, let’s look at some concrete examples. We’ve reviewed a service that offers a product at $5. We’ve reviewed a slew of services that on here that offers products that start at around the $30 range. Despite whatever features the product that you can get for $5 carries, that product’s already going to score a few points in the Price area, because of the simple fact that it’s price is so low; it’s barrier to entry is negligible, when compared to a service that’s charging $30, $40, on up.

So those are the three points to price that we hold against any online backup solution that we review: price per storage, price per bandwidth, and price point. We don’t get into unlimited version histories and things like that because that then delves into a Features focus, and at that point, it’s really a matter of whether the feature’s offered at all by the company or not. With any online backup solution though, you’re going to have the dimension of storage capacity, and the dimension of bandwidth; those are fundamental, and that’s why we grade on these points.

Now, there are a number of services that we’ve reviewed that offer a number of things at an unlimited rate. We recommend these services if you’re looking for the most bang (storage and bandwidth) per buck:

Unlimited Storage        Unlimited Bandwidth
ElephantDrive – Home Edition    Yes    Yes
ElephantDrive – Home Plus Edition    Yes    Yes
Keepit UNLIMITED    Yes    No
Keepit PRO    Yes    No
LiveDrive    Yes    Yes
Mozy Home    Yes    Yes
Mozy Pro    Yes    Yes
MyOtherDrive (all editions)    No    Yes

Of course, there are free accounts to many of the services that we’ve reviewed, but when you consider the fundamentals, primarily storage and bandwidth, what you end up with, with these free accounts is a teaser. You either get practically in the way of storage or practically nothing in the way of bandwidth. And without those two things, what’re you left with? Not much of a backup service, that’s for sure. That’s why we’ve focused on recommendations here on what you get an unlimited amount of.

And when it comes to price point, nothing beats the 5 day subscription of 4Shared Premium. For $5, your free account is granted premium features and services for 5 days. We found this useful for particular projects that were on a tight budget. We used free accounts to get things going, and as participation about the project ramped up, we threw down $5 for Premium for 5 days, and we had the team have at transferring a boat load of the files and documents that needed to be transacted. (It had the positive by-product, residual effect of motivating us to work harder, faster, before—you know—Premium ran out.)

Overall Rating

Online backup, storage, and sharing services are all the rage, and they definitely run the gamut. On one end, you sort of have the shoddier services that are free and are supported by less tasteful advertisements than you would care to be caught seen with. On the other end, there are these class-A quality services that really tailor their systems to suit enterprises (you know, the Fortune 500 class of companies).

What we’ve found in MyOtherDrive is a thorough service with many features, that’s more than just a middle ground; it’s a versatile solution. We’ve reviewed products and services that have a bunch of one sort of feature, like backing up, but are weak on say a feature set for sharing. But with MyOtherDrive, what you’ll find is that there’s a good deal to work with in all areas, not just backing up, security, and sharing, but collaboration as well. We’ll talk about some of the niftier features of this service, such as the ability to actually mail in internal hard drives to the company, to have the data uploaded at the source, as opposed to draining your poor coax cable’s bandwidth to back up your collection of HD movies to the cloud.

Features

Before you get started, it’s worth saying that off the bat, it’s encouraged by this reviewer, as well as by the company, MyOtherDrive itself, to interact with the cloud services’ servers via its client, as opposed to using the Manage My Files feature on the website. That isn’t to say that the website’s features aren’t adequate or somehow not able to handle the jobs of backing up and sharing files; it definitely can, it’s just that the desktop client’s a good deal more convenient. Here are some other points that we’ve drawn conclusions to and that the company also notes that we also agree with:

#1. The desktop app provides a good deal more screen space; websites are notorious for this. And one of our pet peeves is actually toolbars that clutter the browser’s screen real estate.

#2. Also, without the browser, there’s less memory that’s being used; again, the company and this reviewer has the user with scarce resources in mind here.

#3. We’ve found with our tests of the services provided, that they just run faster with the desktop app

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The one thing you’ll need in order to get started with the desktop app, though, is the latest version of Java. Most sites and many applets (such as those found on social networking sites) do actually require Java, so chances are, you probably already have the most current version.

One thing you’ll want to keep in mind about this service is that, from the get go, you’ll notice that things just operate a bit differently than you might be used to with other online storage services. Other backup services, for example, upon installation of the desktop app, set about backing up the files automatically from your PC. That’s one huge plus for us about this service, its that the program forces you to tell the service what to backup, and where to put those files. (Another plus that we forgot to mention earlier is that by using Java to build the desktop app, what you get is a really fast and a really light desktop app; this is rare amongst desktop apps that usually tend to be pretty hefty, with an average file size of 12 MB. With this Java applet you’re downloading a file that’s less than 1 MB, and it’s still pretty robust.)

MyOtherDrive forces you to set up a schedule for backing up; we found this to be very desirable, since we’re operating within the context of “scarce resources.” With other services, you find that backing up takes place, regardless of your input, and when your connection and application experience degrades, you’re left wondering if it’s the backup service or not. With MyOtherDrive, since you set up the rules, you don’t have to wonder; you know when what is being backed up to where. Bandwidth is firmly under control. Nothing sneaky going on here.

File Sharing

We found that this service’s file sharing capabilities were equally strong. The service is surprisingly social, with the profile page to the service actually looking more like a social networking service’s than an online storage and file sharing service’s. The company’s managed to carve out a clear focus with its web operation, which is a pet peeve of ours: with other services, you’re not sure what can or can’t be done on either the desktop app or the web apps. Here, with MyOtherDrive, what you find is that the web is mainly for socializing: sharing files, collaborating, and posting public files.

You can certainly share files and set up permissions on a per folder or per file basis from the desktop app, but especially when it comes to sharing public files, we generally found that we needed to refer to the web anyway, to cut and paste over URLs and other things into other social networking services, so we ended up finding that the web really suited sharing more than anything else. (Besides, the company itself promoted the desktop app for backing up and uploading.)

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Support

Though through our testing we never found the actual need to look for support, we were a bit disappointed to find that support was pretty scant. Granted, there was a lot of content, and when we read through the help files, we did find a lot of technical detail (maybe even too much information), but there isn’t any social piece to the support; there aren’t forums for example. Basically, the knowledge base consists of very thorough text files, and though the “support” and help may be there in all that text, it’s hard to read through, and the presentation of it all was pretty drab. That’s about our only gripe with the service actually, was the presentation and lack of features when it came to support.

Price

The good thing about MyOtherDrive is that it offers a free account. Yes, it’s ad supported, but you don’t experience the sort of obvious degradation in service quality with the free account that you do with other run of the mill online backup services. But that isn’t to say we weren’t swayed by the premium accounts. We certainly were.

The best savings, we found, was with the Enterprise account, which start at about $240 per TB per year. The savings increase as you opt for more TBs, but that’s what it starts at. The pricing’s pretty self explanatory, as the services pretty much only differ by the amount that you can back up, and nothing more. Support, bandwidth and the like aren’t cut in Pro account, for instance. Though you won’t get unlimited parallel downloads (simultaneous downloads) with the free account (perfectly reasonable).

For those on stiffer budgets, you’ll find the starter package, the Pro 100 GB service plan to be very affordable at $4.99 (cheaper than most drive-through fast food value meals).

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Overall Rating

This is one of those online storage and backup services that really subsist on advertising more than their premium subscriptions. The service works very well, overall, but it isn’t by any means an enterprise quality sort of backup service, nor does it provide anything very remarkable in the way of file sharing.

4shared makes for a no frills, but also zero fluff, no nonsense sort of online backup, storage, and file sharing service suite. If you’re looking to get started with file sharing and backing up quickly and cheaply, then this is a service worth looking at.

Features

Signing up is pretty straight forward. In fact, if you have an Open ID, which your email service likely is, then you’ll be able to login that way, and import your name and other demographics from your mail server.

After signing up and confirming your email address, it’s pretty self explanatory about how to get started. You can upload from the web or from the desktop, both processes are basically identical.
Once you log in, you simply begin creating folders and backing up your files. It really doesn’t get any simpler.

In order to upload en mass, there’s a multi upload feature that basically allows you to upload multiple files in one fell swoop. This is one way to get around the file limitation on the free subscription (i.e. breakup the video file into several chapters).

We honestly didn’t like the UI very much; it was cluttered, messy and clunky. Even with multi-upload, nothing about this service felt very streamlined. Again, the service seems tailored to the customer on a tight budget that has a very narrow objective. We can see this service being really useful for users that really just need to get a bunch of files out to several people quickly (and so email really isn’t practical), and cheaply (plans start at just $5, check out the section on Price).

And because of our gripes about the UI, we really don’t recommend installing the various toolbars, desktop apps, etc. Again, (and again) what we’re seeing here with this 4shared offering is no frills, no nonsense, with the widest possible market appeal possible. And to prove this point, you can actually share over the iPhone, there’s a nice little app that they offer for doing this pretty conveniently and productively.

File Sharing

To get started, surprisingly, you don’t even need to log into the website. Head over to the domain and find the big UPLOAD FILES section to the website, and the rest is rather self explanatory. And just that simply you can begin uploading files to the public web. (In the screenshot below, you can see that us uploading an mp3 of a song.)

Now, if you don’t have an account, after the file’s been uploaded, you’ll be greeted with a “Login or Sign Up” webpage, which is pretty self explanatory. Luckily, there’s a completely free plan, no strings attached. Sign up, and you’ll get the URL to the file that you just uploaded.

As soon as you start up a plan and get registered, you can start sharing your files, even with non registered users. You’re given an access link that you can send out via IM, email, etc. You can also shre via email directly, having 4shared email the people you want to address the files to.

And when you share files, there’s the standard set of privacy settings:

• Public: the whole web and its users have access to the file and link; in fact, search engines will eventually index 4shared and have your file available to its consequent set of users
• Permissioned: this status of a file or folder won’t be indexed by a web search engine; and, in fact, in order to access the file, users will have to log in with credentials, i.e. they’ll have to register with 4shared.
• Completely private: nobody but you has access to these files and folders

Here’s the rundown of operating permissions that are worth noting about shared folders:

• Upload files lets users upload any folders they want into the folder that you’ve shared
• Disable anonymous uploads means that only registered users will be able to upload to your folder that you’ve posted to 4shared
• Notify me when new file uploaded is a simple email based reminder that’s sent whenever an uploaded file has completed to the folder that you’ve shared
• Web Grab is a nice little feature that gives you a direct link to the shared item (file or folder), as opposed to an URL to a page with ads that make you wait 30 seconds before a download link appears or is activated (this is premium feature only)

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Support

For support you almost entirely have web content; no support staff. You have two venues for support content, though: the Wiki (what they’re calling the “How to”) and the FAQ (which is probably the most extensive “FAQ” we’ve ever seen; it’s actually a knowledge base).

We really didn’t see any need for support, but it’s always nice to see at least a support staff to call or that would be available, just in case; so we were a little disappointed in that regard. But then again, the motif: budget, economy, no frills. So, that all makes sense. And for plans that start at $5, you really can’t expect that much in the way of support. At any rate, we found the service to be completely reliable and didn’t very much worry over the lack of support for either the free or the premium service.

Price

Again, the budget crowd is the apparent target market here. At $1 a day, which is what you effectively pay with the $5 “premium” plan, there’s something in here, in terms of price, for most anybody. And you can pay by any method you can think of that’s possible over the web. Major credit cards, major web based financial services are all accepted.

What you have with their pricing scheme is basically an ad supported service which is completely free, no strings attached; and then you have the premium service. Here’s what you get with the premium service that we think are notable features:

• Instantaneous downloads (with the ad supported, free service, you’re required to stay on the page for 30 seconds)
• Ad free sharing and downloading
• You can resume downloads, which is nice if you’re downloading from various locations, e.g. a bit of a movie from the coffee shop, resumed downloading at home, and then finishing it off at work (or something like that)
• You get the Web Grab feature, which is convenient
• You get direct URLs, where as the free subscribers merely get a website with the file embedded in.

Again, starting at $5, the price really isn’t an issue. And you’ll be hard pressed to find 100 GB of online storage anywhere on the web for just $77.95 for the year.

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Overall Rating

Overall, ElephantDrive is an intuitive system that isn’t an overbearing weight on your system, the way most other online storage solutions and file sharing programs are. If there was any degradation in application speed, it certainly wasn’t noticeable after installing and having the software go about backing up all the files of our selected systems.

ElephantDrive requires the latest version of Java to be installed on your system, in order for the 11MB executable file to be installed. More and more desktop applications are requiring Java, so you may already have the latest update. If not you can find the latest update through your favorite web search engine.

The desktop app, coupled with the simple, easy to use web interface makes for a service that you can get started with right away, if you’re needing to deploy a backup solution, without having to sacrifice anything in the way of security or features.
As a side note, ElephantDrive picked up many of the displaced X Drive users in 2008 (when AOL sold the company along with several other of its businesses); the migration of those users has since completed, with many picking up subscriptions.

Features

Whenever and wherever the cloud’s concerned, security is of the foremost. And it’s of the utmost priority with this service. It features 128 bit SSL file transfers, what many of the top branded banks, government agencies, and many of the other web services that you rely on, depend on; and before transmission of files, data is encrypted with the advanced 256-bit AES standard. Sometimes, security comes at a price (usually in the way of application speed and experience quality), but nothing seemed to be lacking here.

The main way that you interact with the ElephantDrive cloud is through the firm’s desktop app, ElephantDesktop Manager, which is basically just a square of links to four modules of function and operation: Manage Backups, View Activity, Access Files, Disable Activity.

Manage Backups and View Activity take you to a Backup Jobs and Progress Report, respectively, which shows you a very intuitive itemized list of the statuses of various backup jobs. Surprisingly, the desktop utility got to work very quickly, and immediately various categories were well into the progress of scanning and uploading to the cloud, before we even got to the screen.

The workhorse application is ElephantExplorer. If you you’re comfortable with windows on the Mac, or Windows Explorer on the PC, you’ll feel right at home with ElephantExplorer. It’s a quadrant layout, with the top half being the cloud or rather ElephantDrive, and the bottom half being your local computer.

The application worked very well; you see the files transferring in real time from bottom to top; and if you want to preempt a backup job, you can do so by electing to manually backup select files that you want to prioritize, simply by dragging files from the local (bottom part of ElephantExplorer) to the top destination folder on the ElephantDrive server.

The Disable Activity button on ElephantDesktop Manager is sort of like a kill switch to the whole show. If you wanted to cease and desist all transfers right away, this would be your button. We tested it out, and it worked fine.

A nice feature to the service, which not too many online backup solutions offer, is what they’re calling the TrunkDrive (sticking with the elephant theme). The TrunkDrive exists on your local explorer, and perceives it to be something like an external hard drive.
This feature has obvious uses and purposes. A longer document that you’re working on, you may want to save on the TrunkDrive, to ensure that you have the latest and most current version of the project file, because the TrunkDrive stays in sync across all the computers that ElephantDrive is installed on. We actually found ourselves moving more and more of our work to the TrunkDrive as we tested the service, because of the convenience that the feature affords.

Another cool feature that we found very useful that isn’t found on most online backup solutions and services is the very effective search function. In one fell swoop, you can search through all of your files across all fo the computers being backed up. So say you wrote up a quick memo, but saved it on one of your computers to finish later, but you can’t remember if you saved it on the laptop for work, or your personal laptop, or your desktop in the den. Type in a quick search, and the file’s found for you; you can either access over the web, or get to it on the local computer that the web result says it’s located on.

File Sharing

File sharing is relatively limited with this service. There are other services that allow, for example, direct publishing from the file’s menu of options of actions. But with ElephantDrive, you’re going to find that the main way to share is by email addressing, email invitation. And the function pretty much works the same way on the desktop app as it does on the web app, which is: you find the file that you want to share; then click on the share option, and then you’re allowed 3 email recipients.

Support

Support is sort of limited here, as you won’t find live support either online or via a hotline. You’re largely dependent on the knowledge base, which is actually pretty thorough, and includes quite a bit of history. You’ll get pretty extensive threads on each topic.
There’s also the support forum, and to keep abreast of developments, there’s the company blog.
There is the option of emailing support as well, which is a plain vanilla email, with the direct email address actually listed on the website. (They must get a lot of SPAM?)

But overall, the service worked as purported, and tech support should pretty much be covered by the content that’s available through the company website.

Price

Pricing falls under two categories of services, which are the Home Edition category, and the Pro Edition category. In either category, a prospective customer can elect to trial the service before he actually purchases a service subscription. Plans for Home Users start at $4.95 per month, while Business Users’ plans start at $34.95 per month.

The biggest difference between the Home and Pro accounts is the ability to administer multiple computers, multiple accounts and multiple versions of files. With the top of the line Pro account, the Pro Plus Edition service, what you get is up to 2 TB of storage, which protects up to 20 different workstations.

An interesting note: the Home accounts are listed to have “unlimited storage,” while the Pro services are limited to 1 TB and 2 TB for Pro Plus. Why they limit Pro and not Home, is unclear. But it’s there. Also, on the Home Edition, there’s a file limit of 1 GB (you’re not going to be able to back up very much single file HD video); and for Home Plus, you’re limited to 2 GB per file.
If you go with the full year subscription for any of the services, ElephantDrive is throwing in 2 free months. That’s enticing, but a 15 day trial can go by quick, and may not be long enough for you to make a decision on about a full year or to go for the monthly rate. So you may want to plan and schedule for your trial a bit

When to go with a Pro account, versus a Home account

If you’re working within a group that’s working in the same file, you’ll want to go with a Pro account. This reason this sort of collaboration is preferential to the Pro account is that this category of service offers automatic backups of open files. With the Home services, the backup software’s going to wait until the file’s closed for editing, until the backup’s made; this is less intensive on resources both on your local end, as well as ElephantDrive’s end.

If you’re working within a group, and you’re needing to limit the interactions of certain users with certain files, you’re going to want to go with a Pro account that can administer sub accounts, and most likely want to go with the Pro Plus account, which enables a standard set of permissions to be checked on or off per user.

If you are a current Elephant Drive user please leave your own review, thoughts, comments and ratings below for others to see. That way people don’t have to only take our word for it.

Overall Rating

SugarSync is a way for users that work with a lot of files (music, documents, pictures) and multiple computers (a combination of laptops, desktops, cell phones) to keep all of those things in sync. If you’re a power user that works with a lot of files, you already know how tedious keeping things in sync can be. But even if you’re just a novice that has more than one computer, say a computer at work and another at home, keeping things together can also prove a bit problematic.

Features

Like most online storage services, SugarSync sets out to backup your data immediately after installing the desktop app. The desktop really does two things: it coordinates the backing up between your computers to the cloud, and it allows you to interact with the cloud via the app, as opposed to using the web browser’s interface. Though, you may very well find that the web browser’s interface is a lot more intuitive and productive than the desktop app.

The service automatically begins to sort your files into a few fairly standard categories: documents, music, and photos. Once your photos begin backup up to the SugarSync cloud, you can begin to view those through the Photo Gallery.

A nice little feature that’s proprietary to SugarSync is the Magic Briefcase. The Magic Briefcase is a folder whose files will remain identical across all the computers that are being backed up. So say you have two computers, and you’re between the two a lot while working on a project, you can keep your project files in the Magic Briefcase, to ensure that whenever you set to work on the project, that you’re working on the latest and most current version of the files.

Another neat feature that SugarSync provides is its Web Archive feature. What this does is it segregates a file out from the rest of the synchronization activities between your computers and SugarSync. So, say you’re working on a multiple file Word document, and you particularly like this specific version of one of the documents, you may elect to archive that document, then and there, and the file will be frozen in time, set aside in the archive, for you to refer to, download whenever you want.

File Sharing

One of the cool features to SugarSync is the quick and easy way to socialize straight away from the site’s folders. For instance, you’ll find that once your photos have been backed up to the cloud, that each file and folder is given the opportunity to share the pic with your Facebook friends. You can also share your files the “old fashioned” way, by email. And like you can with other file sharing and online storage services, you can set files to a status of Private or Public.

You can also set up private shared folders. These folders work much the same way shared folders do on other online storage and file sharing services. You set up the folder either through the desktop app or through the website, and then you invite users to come and collaborate and share files within that folder only. You can elect to continuously back up and synchronize the folder with a specific folder on any of the computers that you’re backing up with SugarSync, or you can just upload files to that shared folder manually; it’s really up to you.

Another way that you can share files is through public shares. These public shares, like the aforementioned way you share photos, come with a publicly accessible URL and link that you can email, IM or text to anybody you want to see the file.

Support

Support is pretty standard with SugarSync. You’ve got the knowledge base of course, and you also have a way to contact support over the web. The knowledge base was found to be fairly extensive, with multiple entries and takes from both peer users and support staff themselves. Most of our technical issues were actually resolved via the knowledge base.

If you’re doing a lot of backing up, there are a number of avenues for recourse. You can submit a trouble ticket over the web, or you can get into a live chat with support staff within business select hours. We found that trouble tickets were responded to in less than 48 hours, with the live chat being somewhere between being just as useful to slightly more convenient than the knowledge base.

Overall, support for the service is covered by the knowledge base, which was found to be fairly extensive and largely adequate.

Price

SugarSync’s services fall under two basic classes, what the company calling either its Business Plans or Individual Plans. This isn’t to say that an individual isn’t allowed to take up a business plan; these are just the classes of plans that they have to offer.
Each class offers about four products, a menu that may have changed since, since the company seems to be changing up its offerings as of late. As expected, the business plans cost more than the individual plans, and the business plans are able to be customized to the business’s specific and unique requirements.

The individual plans are pretty straight forward. They’re segregated out into four basic plans, and differ by storage space, and then by monthly rate.

The plans are self explanatory, and though the most savings may be realized through the 250 GB yearly rate, this may be a bit of a commitment, even for the most avid file sharer and file manager. The savings per GB is pretty attractive, so if you do find that the service works well for you for a quarter, particularly if you’re a business customer, it may make sense to get this cost out of the way, cleared away for a year, while realizing the savings as well.

Overall, Sugar Sync is one of the best online backup and sharing services available. All of the features that are required for convenient online storage and sharing are provided and is one of our top recommendations.

If you are a current Sugarsync user please leave your own review, thoughts, comments and ratings below for others to see. That way people don’t have to only take our word for it.

Overall Rating

What you have with LiveDrive is an interesting offering in this increasingly crowded space of online backup, storage and file sharing services. The service is enterprise class, but its price points of $16.95 for the highest end package make the services affordable to the wide mass market.

What makes the offering unique is the fact that neither bandwidth nor storage is metered; nor are these two things capped. That’s right. This is probably the only service out on the web that actually offers truly unlimited storage and bandwidth. There are services that purport to do this, but “unlimited” is “limited” to a number of computers, limited in the way of the number of files, or the size of files, etc. But with LiveDrive, you’re really getting unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, period. No stipulations.

Another defining characteristic that sets this service aside, that differentiates this service from other services is that it takes the completely hassle free approach to online backup and storage. In other words, the program, the app, and the managing of files between your computers and the cloud is sort completely unmanaged; it just has at it, and we’ll get into the details about these processes in a bit, but suffice it to say, we were pleased with both the speed of the backing up, and the application speed and experience; i.e. there wasn’t any noticeable difference or degradation in our systems performance during the initial or subsequent backup sessions.

Features

Upon installation, you select the folders that you want to have backed up, before you even get started with the app. The usual suspects are listed: your Documents folder, your Pictures folder, etc. And as soon as you finish those short, brief initial steps, the backups begin.

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There are a few things that we’re wary about when we have to install desktop utilities and apps. The first is the affects that the installation will have on our system, and we’re always a little relieved when we find that our system doesn’t degrade any, or that nothing adverse happens after installing the app. That was the case here; we installed, and everything performed as usual, so that’s good. The second thing, though, that we watch for is the domination of the screen; i.e. how well is the interface of the app put together? That’s one of the things that these online backup and storage services actually get consistently wrong. But in this case, with LiveDrive, what we have is a very clean interface, with the app itself taking up very little screen real estate. In fact, the primary menu is this little box that looks more like a popup than an actual app that appears when you double click the tray icon. It’s divvied up into two tabs: Backup and Briefcase, each displaying the statuses of each.

So that’s the backing up of your files, the processes anyway. But how you interact with those backed up files is a separate process of course. We found this to be incredibly fluid. Unlike what you have with other service, the application and the website complement each other very well, with the website actually taking a leading role, and with the desktop app really only there to coordinate the backing up of files. With other services, what we’ve found, and what we’ve grown to actually be frustrated with, is the fact that there were always a number of ways of accomplishing the same result, and weren’t always sure which was the more productive way to do something as simple as, say, restoring a folder from the web. With LiveDrive, it’s straightforward, unambiguous, and clear cut: the desktop app is primarily there to coordinate the backup activities, and the website’s for most everything else.

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Briefcase

Briefcase is where the true power of the service is realized. In fact, we feel that LiveDrive is all Briefcase; it’s what LiveDrive is. The feature can do a number of things, but it’s important to keep in mind the fact that things bandwidth and storage are unlimited. Keep that in mind: unlimited.

That dimension to the service is powerful. There are online drives out there that offer this sort of thing, though not at the quality of service that you get with LiveDrive, with the biggest drawback about those services being the limitation on storage space and bandwidth.

The most prominent use and feature of Briefcase is the ability to attach an L: drive to your PC’s operating system, with your Windows Explorer recognizing LiveDrive as an actual other drive, like having an unlimited storage capacity USB drive inserted into all of your PCs (your PCs at work, home, etc.). This wasn’t just amazing because of the fact that the storage capacity was unlimited, but also because the experience of it was super fluid; i.e we actually experienced the L: drive as another drive; it was as quick and fast as a USB drive. Granted, we weren’t expecting, nor could we stream video files off of the drive as well as we could a local C: drive, but we came pretty damn close. That’s point one: the L: drive.

Point two is the ability to edit the same file from more than one PC at the same time, and have the file update. Simply amazing. We were able to even retouch photos on one laptop, and could reliably expect to find those updates on the same file from the other computers we had the Briefcase installed on.

File Sharing

In the Features section, we went over a bit about Briefcase:

• Finding updates of a file on all computers that had LiveDrive installed
• Using L: drive as a universal “USB” drive of infinite storage capacity
• Having access to the same set of files from all computers

For those that socialize and collaborate on the web a good deal, either for work or school, you’ll find that Briefcase is well worth the $16.95 per month that the company’s charging for the set of features. Here’s why:

What you get with Briefcase is the ability to fluidly share files with folks over social networking sites, such as Facebook and Flickr, straight away from your web portal, where you go to view your Briefcase. You can elect to drag and drop files on a whim, which we found to be super convenient when it came to putting together quick and easy albums of particular motifs, themes, and events. (In fact, a number of us here have actually picked up this subscription, practically just for this feature alone: to be able to whip up quick and easy Facebook albums, since the social networking site’s album features are so static; those sites really need to get with some drag and drop functionality.)

File sharing’s made super easy with Briefcase. The company is offering what they’re calling One-Click Sharing. And what that basically does is it allows you to post a public file, say, with one click (on the PC, it’s the right-click menu option), and to post that public file on the web.

You get the standard permissions set with LiveDrive:

• Public files that are posted to the web, which you get an URL that you can send to friends over an IM window
• Permissions based files and folders, which you can invite users to
• And completely private, locked down files and folders that only you can view

Support

With a number of these other fly by night online backup, storage and file sharing services, you really have shoddy support. So, though we didn’t find that we needed support, we found that that our available options were quite extensive, and that was refreshing. Both services (see section on Price) offer the standard service and support package, and the company websites claim a response by a live support staff within 24 hours. However, Backup & Briefcase subscribers will have priority over the Backup only subscribers. (We didn’t find or figure out how that would affect a Backup only subscriber.)

The knowledge base is extensive, with multiple articles and versions kept on various subjects, and with peer and forum type platforms for users to share experiences with, and to even help trouble shoot problems with. Support was more than adequate, unlike what you’ll find with a good portion of the services out there on the web.

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Price

In terms of pricing, what you get with LiveDrive are two services. Since bandwidth and storage are both unlimited, you’re not left with very many big decisions to make. Bu there is one big decision: Briefcase. Briefcase is going to cost you three times as much as the standard backup solution, but it’s a compelling service; but is it worth the $16.95 a month? It depends on how often you socialize and collaborate on the web.

The problem we had was that the company doesn’t offer a trial on the Briefcase service, it only offers the trial on the Backup only solution. So, you’re forced into subscribing for a month. The 16 bucks should is rather negligible but we’d really would have preferred that the service be open to trial. The savings on the yearly subscription for the Briefcase is substantial; you’re basically getting about a month and a half free if you pay the full year up front. See the section on features of Briefcase to see if you feel it’s worth trying the service, at a fee, for a month. For what it’s worth, the Facebook features alone compelled a number of us to sign up for Briefcase, for at least a few months, if not to just spruce up our photo albums a bit.

If you are a current LiveDrive user please leave your own review, thoughts, comments and ratings below for others to see. That way people don’t have to only take our word for it.

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Overall Rating

What we have with Mozy, is an online backup, storage, and file sharing suite that epitomizes what that whole web 2.0 movement was all about: minimalist and very simple and easy to use interfaces and approaches, and extremely consistent high quality service. And in the end, you have a product and service that’s highly intuitive and reliable, which is why we highly recommend the premium service.

Product Philosophy

Mozy’s actually owned by a Fortune 500 company, EMC Corporation, which has offices all over the world, including the UK, China, and other countries. The product philosophy’s pithy enough: set it, forget about it, depend on it. This relatively simple statement, though, implies a number of pretty sophisticated assumptions: the service is secure and safe, and that the software and technologies involved are very smart (i.e. so smart that you can just leave them, and forget about them).

Features

In order to interact with the Mozy cloud, you’ll have to install a desktop app, which is available for both the Mac and Windows based computers. Installation runs simply enough, and you’ll find that the steps involved are really self explanatory. There weren’t any surprises or anything remarkable about the installation process.

After installing, that “setting it” part (you know, just before you “forget it”) takes place; you elect for all of the folders (well those folders within your storage limit; if you’re on the free service, you’re limited to 2 GB; see the Price section for more details) that you want to have backed up on an on-going basis.

After you set up those folders, you’re set, and the backing up starts immediately. Quick and easy indeed.

What we liked about Mozy is that we did indeed forget about it. We had to reboot our system for another installation, and with our short attention spans, forgot what we were doing by the time our system came back online. It’s so good at what it does that you literally won’t notice it running in the background. If it weren’t for the progress reports and status pop-ups, we would’ve forgotten that gigs and gigs of our data were being uploaded to the Mozy cloud.

After the desktop utilities through scanning and backing up your files, what happens next is, you’re going to have to do a bit of management about your backups and online storage. The features about this are incredibly self explanatory, and since they’re really just a few basic options, we’re just going to briefly list what’s possible.

First up: you can set up your backups to either happen automatically or only on a schedule. The default is to happen automatically, so if you prefer this not to be the case, you’ll have manually get into the app to adjust this, and then set up a schedule for the backups to run. Some of our offices run backups only at the end of every business day, while other departments run backups once, or twice a week. All depends on how active you are with your data; it’s a personal preference.

Second, there’s bandwidth throttling; in other words, you can cap the absolute amount of your total available bandwidth by setting the value manually. This is good if you’ve got other bandwidth intensive things going on, like if you’re podcasting live, or if you’re downloading a huge file that can’t be taken down in pieces.

And then finally, there are the restore options. These are pretty standard and straight forward, with options ranging from downloading a restoration file, to even ordering a DVD copy of your files be sent to you via FedEx.

A nice little feature to the premium services (and something you’re seeing a lot more with these online backup and storage suites) is version history; this is particularly helpful and useful when it comes to larger document projects. Another feature that falls under File Support is the service’s ability to backup files that are in use, open or otherwise locked up; we get this all the time with email and calendar client files, browser plug-ins, etc.

File Sharing

While Mozy is probably the best backup service we’ve seen on the web, surprisingly, it really doesn’t offer anything in the way of file sharing. The closest that the service has to offer is the ability to restore your files on any of the computers that you’ve elected to backup, and it does that very, very well. But in terms of any integration, for example, with social networking services: nothing. Not so much as a photo share feature. This was sort of disappointing, because we would have really liked to see the Mozy quality of its high standard and caliber applied to file sharing, and not just backups.

Support

You can kind of gauge and measure the quality of a service by how much support they throw behind the service. With Mozy, what you’ll find is a ton of support, more than what we’re used to with these online backup, storage, and file sharing services. You basically have 3 very thorough options when it comes to support: the knowledge base, which the user community contributes the most; you have the the manuals (for both the Windows and the Mac clients); and you have support portal. Heck, even the user community and the support portal’s got a tutorial. That all said, given that the service primarily only serves as a backup service, there really wasn’t anything for us to call on support about, so we didn’t really need it.

Price

Mozy is offering its backup services to home users and business users. On the home user side of its offerings, you basically have the free or the premium service. With the free service, you’re limited to 2 GB of storage space, which is hardly anything; so the service is obviously a marketing mechanic. With the premium home service, though, what you’re getting is unlimited storage capacity; that’s a huge sell right there. And though we found the service to be of a quality that’s super reliable, we really couldn’t see ourselves committing to a cloud service for more than a year. (Who knows what will be available next year, right?)

But for all of the consumer grade marketing and appeal that Mozy offers up on its site, we actually found the best deal to be for the business services, particularly the server backup service. Backing up in-house servers is an extremely costly thing to do, in terms of cash but also just in terms of the time that’s put into maintaining backup regiments. Now, Pro services are priced at the per desktop or server level, i.e. per CPU. Desktop licenses run at $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month, while server licenses run $6.95 + $0.50/GB per month.

Overall Rating

With Keepit, you have an example of a firm and service that does exactly what it purports to do; it’s reliable; it’s predictable; and it’s straight forward. No fluff here, nothing ambiguous about what the firm’s offering or going after. They’re a backup service, pure and simple. They’re not going to muddy up this competency with a plethora of half baked share features, or blogging or other web 2.0 type features. No gimmicks, just the backup service. And that’s what we liked about this offering.

What we didn’t like, though, was the fact that there wasn’t as much as an email share sort of feature, where we can invite friends with an email address to view directory of photos we had backed up to the Keepit cloud.

But the clenching disappointment really had to be the completely inadequate support content. Through our testing of the service, we didn’t really feel the need to actually inquire about a real technical issue, but we did poke around the site a bit to try to find a forum or something, a user supported knowledge base or something, but really couldn’t find very much more than the FAQ, which was only 10 points long.

Ultimately, we were left wondering if the service was comprised of a couple of college kids that liked to drink beer, and new a thing or two about reselling cloud resources. If anything, well drawn out support content and support facilities is just a matter of plain old professionalism.

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Features

Configuring Keepit to backup was simple enough; you basically download the 11 MB msi file for Windows (there’s also a client for the Mac, but we didn’t test it), and then the desktop app walks you through the very straight forward process of setting up the backup process.

Just as a side note, there’s this cute little feature that the desktop app does: it integrates announcements of the latest blog posts into the header of the app. We found this helpful, and the entries posted there were actually pretty interesting, pretty useful.

So, you configure your backups, set the schedule and then basically let the utility run on its own. By default, Keepit checks off the usual directories on Windows, such as Documents, Pictures, Desktop, etc. But you can select whatever you folder you want to keep backed up to the cloud. It’s all up to you. Like any other of these online storage and backup services, Keepit uses proprietary compression methods and encryption to help keep all the activity between your computers and the Keepit cloud, safe, secure and fast.

As soon as you’ve configured your backup schemes, then Keepit sets out about transferring those files up to the Keepit cloud, where you’ll be able to access your restoration files whenever you need.

Keepit prides itself on security, stability and speed, and boasts of a number of hardware and software innovations on its website that keeps the quality of its services suite at the upper echelon of what’s readily available to consumers. But overall, what we found was that the service was sort of no frills, no nonsense; it did what it purported to do, which was simply to backup your data, and nothing really more or less than that. No breakthroughs here, in other words. But it does do what it says it can do.

One of the main criticisms that we have about online backup solutions is that they slow systems down to a crawl whenever we start backing up. But we didn’t find this to be the case with Keepit, thankfully. After installing and commencing the backup procedures, our systems that tested the Windows client didn’t experience any noticeable degradation in application speed or application experience, whatsoever.

Of course, the backup progress completely depended on our connection, and we submit to that. We got our docs of about 500 MB backed up in about 30 minutes off of a typical residential coax cable connection to the internet. So: no red flags, but nothing shockingly extraordinary here either. Again, Keepit does what it says it can do.

The application itself we found to work just as advertised. And it all was really self explanatory, as we weren’t left with any unanswered questions or even had any questions about what else can be done about the service.

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File Sharing

A bit of a disappointment in this area, most online storage and backup services will feature a minor capability to share things over social networking sites, or even to email recipients. But this was completely lacking in this service. Keepit is “keeping” with the backup line of services solely and apparently exclusively. There aren’t any plans, as far as we can tell, for the company to provide anything more than the backup line of services.

Support

Support was lacking as well, actually. It was one of the things that we felt might have needed to be filled in, filled out a bit more, but support here was actually inadequate. In fact, you won’t find the word “support” on any of the front pages of the Keepit website; instead, you’ll have a help link, which actually just links over to the FAQ.

And thought the FAQ is pretty good, it’s pretty much all you really have in the way of support with the company. You have a general contact page, where you can send an email over to customer service, and you have an office address, as well as a toll free hotline that you can call up. But we were actually pretty unclear about whether those were sales lines or support lines.

The email form on the customer service page says, “We aim to answer you within 24 hours,” which we found sort of ambiguous. Was that time stipulation there because the form was meant to be used as a tech support trouble ticket form, or was it a sales inquiry form? It just wasn’t at all clear. And again, why did “Help” just link to the FAQ? We really didn’t get that.

Price

Keepit is selling two lines of backup services. One is geared toward the private home user, while the other is geared to the “more demanding user, who uses multiple computers and has special storage space needs.”

The webpage on the prices is very clear cut, and the takeaway is this: the home service costs $4/month, and the Pro service costs $3 per PC/month. There are a few things that were awfully ambiguous however. We’ll list them:

• Why is “GB space” unlimited for the home user, but “optional” for the business user? What do they mean by GB space being “optional?”
• And, what’s the point of listing the $0.00/GB rate again?
• And for the home user, they list the number of pictures and music files that are allowed to be backed up as being “unlimited,” but for the business user, this is “variable?”

There aren’t any footnotes or anything that clears any of this up. In fact, the phrasing of “perquisites” is just sort of awkward (“None, other than payment on time”). The service works fine, but these little things just rubbed us the wrong way. Make of it what you will.

If you are a Keepit user please feel free to leave your own review, comments and ratings below for others to see. That way people don’t have to take our word for it.
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