There has been an explosion in the number of remote backup services recently. I figured I'd get a list together of some of the more interesting ones I've seen recently.

• Syncplicity

  Syncplicity is a lot like Dropbox, but isn't limited to just one folder on your computer. It keeps a version history and allows you to share folders with other Syncplicity users. Also like Dropbox, you get 2GB for free and another 50GB for $9.99 a month. Windows only.

• Backblaze

  Backblaze is a regular backup solution much like Mozy or JungleDisk with a couple of cool features:

  1. You can order your files on DVD or USB Drive. This is a very cool way to have a remote and local backup without having to go through the work of doing the local backup yourself.
  2. Unlimited backup size for $5 a month.
  3. Ability to set your own encryption key.

  This is definitely a company I'm watching at the moment. Works on Windows and Mac.

• HP Upline

  Even HP is getting into the act with HP Upline. It's nice to see an established company getting into the act but for a hardware manufacturer, I'm always worried that these extra services outside of their main business will be the first to go when they need to cut down on their products. The plans seem pretty standard; one computer on the backup for $59 a year. Windows only.

  UPDATE: Wow, that was quick. HP Upline goes offline. Looks like the big players don't want to be in this business.

Not only are more solutions coming in the near future, there'll be solutions from big names like Microsoft, Symantec and possibly even Google. Time will tell how this all shuffles out.

It's sad to hear it after hearing good things about the company, but it looks like Carbonite has faked five star reviews on Amazon.com. This doesn't mean their product is bad, but a lot of what goes into selecting a remote backup solution is whether you can trust the company or not. If this is how they promote their product, I'd feel a lot less secure about how they run their company.

I've also had reservations about the fact that they only have one data center where they keep your data and don't really keep backups of that. There are many legitimate one star reviews of Carbonite that talk about users not being able to get their data back during a restore. That is completely unacceptable for a backup solution.

I want to apologize for recommending or even thinking that this is a good solution. I recommend never even looking at Carbonite as a remote backup solution.

My current remote backup solution is JungleDisk. Since it's one that I use and am familiar with, I figured it'd be the first review I do. There are other solutions out there, but I think JungleDisk will fit most people's needs the best.

Features

JungleDisk is a front end application to Amazon.com's S3 service. Amazon's S3 remote storage runs on Amazon's many servers and features redundant backups in multiple locations and a very cheap price. JungleDisk has two main uses; as an automatic incremental backup and as a remote hard drive.

JungleDisk's main feature is a automatic backup of the files on your computer. You can set up which directories and files get backed up and how often. You can also restrict certain file types from being backed up, like MPG files or files that end in .bak. During the backup run, JungleDisk will only upload files that have changed since the last backup. This saves on the time it takes to run the backup and helps you save money, since you have to pay for the amount of data transfered to and from S3.

JungleDisk also mounts the remote file system onto your computer, allowing you to use your JungleDisk bucket as if it was a local hard drive. With this, you can see all the backup files and recover them if needed. You can also use S3 as a remote storage unit of your own, dragging and dropping files into the S3 bucket, bypassing JungleDisk's scheduled backup features if you want.

To me, one of the killer features is that JungleDisk allows you to set an encryption key for your files. This means that the only person who can read your backup files is you. JungleDisk won't have access and Amazon won't have access. Only someone with the key that you set will be able to view the files. You'll have to protect your key in case your computer crashes and you have to recover your files, but no one who gets your files from Amazon will be able to see them.

Pricing

JungleDisk is a steal at only $20 with lifetime upgrades. I have never seen a computer program so useful yet so cheap in my life. You can also try it for 30 days to see if you like it. If you don't, just delete the S3 account from Amazon and uninstall JungleDisk. You'll only pay the Amazon S3 fees for that month.

There is also a Plus service that is designed to help you save money if you back up very large files. It costs $1 a month and is designed to help people that backup up very large files by caching parts of those backups on JungleDisk's servers. I don't backup very large files, so I haven't tried this service.

Even though I don't pay a monthly fee to JungleDisk, I do have to pay S3 for storing my files. I currently keep about 5GB of data on S3 between two computers with nightly backups. This has ended up running me about $1.20 a month, which is nothing compared to the piece of mind JungleDisk has given me. You can check the Amazon S3 Calculator for what your monthly price might be. Keep in mind that the Storage is the amount of data your saving, Data Transfer-in will be the amount of changed files in a month, Data Transfer-out will be the number of files you recover in a month (should be zero), PUT/LIST requests are done when checking the cached files against your current files. PUT/LIST requests are the hardest to estimate, but mine are at about 15,000 a month. From that, you should be able to estimate your usage and what your monthly fee might be. Remember that, for the first month, your Storage and Data Transfer-in numbers will be the same, but every month after that Data Transfer-in will just be the size of new/changed files.

Future Worries

My only real worry is that JungleDisk was recently bought by Rackspace. Rackspace recently announced a cloud storage of their own which competes with S3. I really like S3's pricing and service and would hate to have to switch, but there have been a couple of reassurances by JungleDisk's author that S3 will stick around as an option, which makes me feel better.

I have a cheatsheet in the works for JungleDisk and will be posting it soon. For now, I recommend installing it, getting an Amazon S3 account and setting up a quick backup of your most important files.

I want to remind everyone that we all have things that we must make sure we keep. There are so many things on your computer that deserve your attention more than you might think.

When I was growing up, I can remember looking through family photo albums that my parents had. It included pictures of them when they were babies all the way up to when they got married. There were also family members I had never met, great aunts and uncles, grandparents and great grandparents. To me and my family, those pictures are priceless.

I don't know what kind of photo album my children will look at, but I'll bet you it's digital. More and more of our family photographs and letters are on our computers, sometimes only on our computer, and we have an obligation to future generations to keep it safe.

I've always heard horror stories about a family's whole history going up in a house fire or flood. Those stories always scare me and I know they bother my wife, who does our family genealogies.

Luckily, we've digitized most of our older family photos and any new photos are from digital cameras. While hard drives and CD storage is more fragile than actual photographs, digital data is able to be duplicated with no loss of quality and is very inexpensive to store. That means we can have multiple copies of it stored in multiple places and if a hard drive fails or a CD breaks, we won't have lost all those memories.

That is the whole reason this blog was started, to help you protect and keep what is most valuable to you. Whether that's your company's financial documents or your child's baby pictures, some of what you have on your computer is priceless. I want you to dedicate yourself, right now, to reading the suggestions in this blog and taking the time to protect your data. I don't want you to be too late on this. Once you're too late, there's no going back and fixing it.

I've talked about the backup plan, and I'll soon get into specifics on what programs and services to use. Keep this post in mind when reading them and, if you aren't using these services, please implement them soon. You won't regret it.

I talked about setting up a backup plan, but there's another thing to think about; what should you backup? It should be clear that the more you backup, the more you'll pay for your backups. By being selective in what you backup, you'll be able to keep the costs down. I've gone through this myself and came up with a couple simple rules to follow.