Selecting An Online Back Up Service
LiveDrive – Overall Best Online Backup Service
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.)
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On August 22, 2010 joe wrote:
nice post. thanks.