Brian @ Wongside

I’m in the market for an online backup solution. Historically, I’ve backed up my stuff to CD and DVD. But since I now have over 100GB of photos, it’s getting a bit unwieldy. The 1TB hard drive likely won’t help the situation either.

I’m looking at a few solutions, namely:

• Backblaze
• Carbonite
• Mozy

Backblaze is probably the newcomer to the group. I first heard about them on my favorite tech news site: Arstechnica. I think the thing I like about them is tye keep it stupid simple, and have a pretty nifty restore function no one else has: if your computer dies, (for a fee) they’ll mail you a DVD or USB hard drive full of your data. The one concern I have about Backblaze is the very fact that they are young. They seem to have an all-star team of leaders, but they’re such a young company, it’s hard to tell what their future is. I did find at least one user who switched from Mozy to Backblaze. Backblaze costs $5/month or $50/year

Carbonite seems pretty similar on the backup side, but doesn’t seem to offer a similar restore process. I think the one thing that concerns me about them is that they lost a bunch of their customers’ data earlier this year. Carbonite costs $54.95/year.

Mozy seems like a decent company. I think the one thing they have going for them is that they’re a part of storage and infrastucture giant EMC. That means they’ve got some serious backing, and likely won’t disappear anytime soon. I also like the fact that between Mozy and Carbonite, Walt Mossberg prefers Mozy.  The downside is that someone else found that it was a pain to restore from them. The fact that they give 2GB of free space is nice, but I’ve got almost 200GB I’ll need to backup, so that’s really immaterial to me. Mozy costs $4.95/month or $54.45/year.

There are a few downsides to doing online backup, and they certainly deserve special consideration:

1. Uploading takes forever. I’ve got a 6mbps DSL line, and Speakeasy says my upload is only 650kbps, meaning I could upload about 6GB per day. (Speedtest.net generally confirms this.) If I have to upload 200GB of data, that’s 33 days straight.
2. These services are subject to failure. I don’t worry about security as all of these solutions do proper encryption. But as noted above, Carbonite lost the data of 7,500 customers. I don’t think Backblaze was even in existence yet, but their data center of choice had a power outage in 2007. I’ve yet to hear of any problems at Mozy. Fortunately, neither of these issues is ultimately catastrophic to the data (the issue of credibility is entirely different). Since these are backup services, Carbonite customers should have been able to do a re-upload or “re-backup” and have their information be safe once again. Assuming they were in existence, Backblaze customers merely would have needed to wait for the servers to come back up in order to continue a backup or restore–no data was lost.
3. What happens if the companies disappear? Upline was a backup service provided by tech giant Hewlett-Packard. It shut its doors earlier this year, proving that even Mozy–as a part of EMC–might not be immune to being shutdown by it’s corporate backers.  Backblaze might not have to worry about the corporate bueracracy, yet. But what if they aren’t profitable, or run out of funding before hitting the black? They could very well shut their doors as well. And if they get bought by another company, their policies might change to the detriment of consumers, or their new overlords might shut them down for whatever reason.

All in all, I think an online backup service will serve as a secondary or tertiary backup solution around here. I’ll likely keep backing up to DVDs (or Blu Ray when I can get my hands on a burner) and to Charlene’s computer, and have an online, continuous backup solution in the cloud.

I’ll keep you posted as I find more, and when I make my decision.