If you're backing up your data but you're not saving it offsite, you're putting it at risk. If something happens to your home or electronics, all that data could be lost. That's why there are tons of affordable, easy-to-use online backup services that you can send your data to seamlessly for safe keeping. This week we're going to look at five of the best, based on your nominations.
Why You Should Always Have More Than One Backup
Your data really isn't safe unless you're backing up properly and with lots of…
Read more Read
Advertisement
It's been a long time since we last looked at online backup tools, so we figured it was time to take another look. Earlier this week we asked you which online backup services were the best: The ones that offered the most seamless and simple backups, fast and complete restores, easy-to-use backup clients, and of course, storage for your money. You responded with a number of options, but we only have room for your top five. Here they are, in no particular order:
Five Best Online Backup Tools
The best way to protect your files is through using any of our best online backup solutions and we have made a further selection of the very best cloud backup for Mac. Mozy is the best online backup for users who wanna keep their documents, music, photos and digital property as safe. As it is simple to use, more users make use of this service as a better choice for them.
Local backup is a useful and necessary part of securing your data against catastrophe, but with the …
Read more Read
Advertisement
The polls are closed and the votes are counted! To see which of these five great online backup services took the top spot, head over to our Hive Five followup post to see and discuss the winner.
Most Popular Online Backup Service: Crashplan
Backing up your files locally is important, but if something like fire or flood happens, your data…
Read more Read
Advertisement
Carbonite
Carbonite is one of the web's most popular online backup services, and for good reason. The Carbonite client runs quietly in the background uploading your data to Carbonite's servers to make sure it's safe in case something happens to your computer. Carbonite can automatically back up documents, music, email, and other files (although it manually backs up video), and grants you access to those files and your archives on your smartphone. Carbonite supports Windows and OS X (although its Home Plus and Home Premier plans only support Windows), and make restoring your files as easy as backing them up. Your offsite files are encrypted to keep them safe from prying eyes, and all of their plans include unlimited storage for your backed up files. Carbonite's Home Plus plan extends its features and allows you to back up external hard drives and not just files on your computer, and allows you to back up full system images. The Home Premier plan includes both of those features and adds automatic backup of your video files, and a courier recovery service that delivers you backups on a hard drive to you ASAP if something terrible happens.
Advertisement
Carbonite is online backup only, so it doesn't really work well for local backups or backups to external drives. You'll still have to handle that yourself. You can try Carbonite for free for 15 days, but after that you'll need to pay up $60/yr to back up one computer with their Home plan, $100/yr to back up one computer with their Home Plus plan, and $150/ur to back up one computer with their Home Premium plan. You can read more about Carbonite's plans and pricing here.
Backblaze
Backblaze earned praise from many of you for being easy to set up, even for non-technical people. It's built for people who want to get their data backed up, without being forced to search for error codes and cryptic status messages whenever something goes wrong. To that point, Backblaze backs up just about everything on your system. You get some control over what's backed up and what isn't, but the point is to be fast, easy, and hands-off, so everything on your system—documents, music, video, external drives you have plugged in, just about anything. Instead of telling what they do back up, Backblaze actually has a special page dedicated to what they don't back up instead. Backblaze offers unlimited storage for your backed up data, and while by default it only backs up files smaller than 4GB, you can bump that up if you need to. Like other online backup services, it runs in the background, backing up your data all the time (or when you schedule it to, if you prefer), and your data is encrypted so only you have access to it. It supports Windows and OS X, and is smart enough to de-dupe data, do incremental backups, and keep backup processes low on system resources. You can read more about Backblaze's features here.
Advertisement
BackBlaze doesn't have an offline component, so you'll have to handle that yourself, but it's by far one of the most affordable options on the market. Accounts are $5/mo (you get a break if you pay up front for one or two years), and you can add more computers to the same account for another $5/mo. You can read more about Backblaze's pricing options here.
CrashPlan
CrashPlan is our favorite backup tool for Windows, for the Mac, and we've even shown you how to build a bulletproof backup solution with it. CrashPlan gives you the flexibility to back up any folders you select on your computer (or whole drives, if you prefer) to external hard drives, other computers on the same network, a friend's computer across the internet, or online to CrashPlan's own servers, where it's stored and encrypted to keep your data safe. The backup utility is set-it-and-forget-it, and it runs quietly in the background whenever you're away from your computer, or at specified times of day. It's smart enough to only do differentials and incrementals, and supports multiple backup destinations so you can back everything up at one time everywhere it needs to go. Restores are just as easy, and a few clicks drops all of your files right back where they should be. You even get access to your backup data on your mobile devices. If you have a ton of data to back up or restore, you can even have CrashPlan send an external hard drive to your house that you can back up to and use to seed your first backups or restore from, all without blowing past your ISP's bandwidth limitations. You can read more about CrashPlan's features here.
Advertisement
The Best Online Backup App for Windows
You should back up your hard drive. You’ve heard it a million times, but most people don’t do it.…
Read more Read
CrashPlan is completely free if you're just doing local backups, but even online backups are affordable, with CrashPlan+ accounts starting at $2/mo (per computer) for 10GB of online backup storage, and going up to $4/mo (per computer) for unlimited online backup storage and $9/mo for unlimited online backup storage for a whole household. You can check out their plans here, and try them free for 30 days with a new account.
Advertisement
SpiderOak
SpiderOak is well known as one of the most privacy-centric cloud storage services, but it's also a great backup service. The same power and features that you get for file syncing and access extend to its backup client, and SpiderOak's 'Zero Knowledge' policy extends to your backups as well. Even they don't know what you're storing on their servers, and all of your data is encrypted on their servers and before it leaves your computer. The SpiderOak desktop client has a fully-featured backup tool in it that lets you back up your entire desktop, documents, email, music, or movies right to the cloud, or you can hit the 'Advanced' tab and pick the files and folders you want to save, including external drives, network drives, or anything else on your computer. As you add files to your backup job, you'll get a live preview of how much space you'll use with what kinds of files, and whether you have space for it. SpiderOak supports Windows, OS X, and Linux, has mobile apps for iOS and Android, can do incrementals, and if you uncheck a file to stop backing it up, the files will still live in your SpiderOak account, just as an archive. Your backups happen in the background, or when you schedule them.
Advertisement
The Best Cloud Storage Services that Protect Your Privacy
Cloud storage is easy to come by. Dozens of services shovel tons of free space to you just for…
Read more Read
SpiderOak's beauty is that it's a combination cloud syncing and storage service as well as a backup client all in one. Unlike some of the other services though, you'll have to pay for the storage you use. You get 2GB for free just for signing up, and you can get up to 10GB by referring friends. SpiderOak Plus nets you 100GB for $10/mo to use for syncing and backups, and every 100GB after that is another $10/mo. Plus, you can connect as many computers to any SpiderOak account as you want, so you're not paying by the system. You can read more about SpiderOak's plans here.
Advertisement
Bitcasa Infinite Drive
Advertisement
Bitcasa Infinite Drive is relatively new, but it's one of your favorite cloud storage providers in general, mostly because they offer virtually unlimited stroage for syncing and backups. When we say unlimited, we mean it—some of you are using terabytes of storage with Bitcasa. It's not primarily a backup service though, and while it was built for file syncing and storage, the Bitcasa desktop client does support regular file backups. Bitcasa supports Windows and OS X, and encrypts all of your files before uploading so they stay safe from prying eyes. Bitcasa even keeps revision history, so if you've backed up a file multiple times and need an older version, you can pick it out and restore it. Plus, you can use the Bitcasa mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone to access your data on the go.
Five Best Cloud Storage Providers
Free cloud storage is easy to come by these days—anyone can give it out, and anyone can give out…
Read more Read
Advertisement
Bitcasa starts you off with 10GB for free, but $100/yr throws the floodgates open and gets you unlimited storage for anything you want to sync, share, or back up. Plus, you can connect as many computers or devices to your account as you choose, so you don't pay by the PC. It's client isn't quite as robust as some of the other tools here, but if you're more interested in a flat fee for unlimited space and you can handle the details of which files go where and when, it's a solid option. You can read more about Bitcasa's pricing here.
Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to an all-out vote to determine the winner.
Advertisement
No honorable mentions this week, as the nominations dropped off pretty sharply from these five. Some of you pointed to your own kind of franken-backup solution that made use of traditional cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive in addition with desktop utilities and clients that can automatically copy whatever you want from your computer to specified files and folders in those services, which is a great option if you want the absolute ultimate in control.
Advertisement
Best Online Backup For Mac
Have something to say about one of the contenders? Want to make the case for your personal favorite, even if it wasn't included in the list? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Don't just complain about the top five, let us know what your preferred alternative is—and make your case for it—in the discussions below.
The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it—it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at [email protected].
Advertisement
If you don’t back up your Mac’s files, then it’s a matter of when—not if—you’ll lose data that’s precious to you. Apple already robbed Mac users of any excuse not to back up regularly with Time Machine. But a single bad power surge, or a true disaster like fire or vicious weather, could render your Time Machine backups worthless.
Fortunately, off-site backup is easier than ever. A slew of Web services offer affordable online backup for your Mac. These services are often simple to use as well: you install software from the service on your computer, and it backs up your files over the Internet. By keeping current copies of your treasured data far away from your home, you can feel far more confident that your files are safe.
I looked at six online backup providers: Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, JungleDisk, Dropbox, and CrashPlan. They all offer the same core approach, but vary significantly in precisely what they offer, what they charge, and how they work. Note that when you first start backing up your files with an online service, it can take some time to upload all your data—even days. If your Internet service provider caps your bandwidth, you may need to consider throttling your initial backup (by limiting how much data the backup service can transfer per day, or by limiting the number of files it backs up initially and ramping up over time), or instead choosing a service like CrashPlan that lets you send in a hard drive for your initial backup (with an additional cost).
Backblaze
Backblaze is a fairly typical example of how these online offerings work. The service costs $5 per month (or $50 for a year), which affords you unlimited backups for the files on a single computer, and any directly attached USB and Firewire hard drives. (Extra discounts are available if you prepay even more; the price gets as low as $3.96 per month if you pay for two years at a time.)
Like several services covered here, Backblaze places limits on what types of files it will back up. It specifically doesn’t back up the operating system, installed software, temporary files, or any files larger than 9 GB. Fortunately, seemingly huge files like your iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom libraries are generally smaller than they appear, since they’re really bundles of many files—which Backblaze can handle.
Backblaze’s software runs as a well-designed pane in System Preferences on your Mac. The options are simple: You can initiate a backup, check out restore options, or configure settings. The settings let you throttle how fast Backblaze backs you up (and thus how much of your bandwidth it consumes), exclude specific files, and browse reports and logs regarding just what the software is doing. Download stdfix.h mac xcode. On the whole, it’s very simple to navigate and configure the preference panel.
Backblaze backs up your files continuously (though you can switch to once daily or manually triggered instead), and keeps up to four weeks of file revisions. When you need to restore files, you can do so for free via a Web interface, or order your files on a DVD (for $99) or a USB drive (for $189).
Mozy
On the whole, Mozy is pretty similar to Backblaze. Mozy costs $4.95 per month per computer, or as little as $4.33 per month if you prepay for two years at a time. Like Backblaze, Mozy runs on your Mac as a preference pane. Also like Backblaze, the service keeps up to 30 days’ worth of file revisions, backs up your files continuously, and ignores certain file types like your applications. Mozy—again, like Backblaze—wisely uses what it calls “block level” backups, meaning that the service attempts to back up only new or changed portions of files, to save bandwidth and time. And, like Backblaze, it backs up any drives connected via USB or Firewire.
That said, Mozy’s file restoration options aren’t quite as good as Backblaze’s. You can order a DVD with your files, and its cost is variable: $30 for setup, 50¢ per GB of data, and $40 for shipping (via FedEx’s Next Day Air service). 60 GB of data would thus cost about $100. Mozy’s Web-based restore interface isn’t great, particularly when you need to restore larger amounts of data: Mozy generates multiple disk images for you to download—each about 1 GB. And I found that those downloads didn’t always keep my folder hierarchies consistent—different disk images would contain the same parent folder, with different files and subfolders in each image. You’re able to restore your data with Mozy, but the process is far more painful than it should be.
While Mozy’s preference pane isn’t as cleanly laid-out as Backblaze’s, it lets you accomplish most of the same tasks without much confusion: You can adjust how much bandwidth the software uses, exclude specific files, adjust the backup schedule, and browse logs.
Acrobat x standard serial key. Both Mozy and Backblaze offer free trials.
Carbonite
Carbonite’s offering isn’t quite as compelling, particularly for Mac users. The cost is about the same: $4.58 per month per computer, or as little as $3.61 if you prepay for three years in advance. By default, the service backs up photos, e-mails, documents, music, and personal settings, but you can also add videos, “executable files,” and files larger than 4 GB. Windows users get niceties like 90 days worth of file versioning, but the company doesn’t offer those features in the Mac version of its software.
Like Mozy and Backblaze, Carbonite’s main interface on your Mac is through a System Preferences pane—and the controls it offers are frustratingly sparse. You can enable a “low-priority mode to conserve bandwidth,” but the software lacks the more detailed bandwidth controls that other backup solutions offer. And the interface for excluding specific files and folders is needlessly clunky, since it lacks drag-and-drop support and instead forces you to work through a hierarchical file browser.
Carbonite cleverly tweaks your files’ icons so that you know their status: backed up, will be backed up, or excluded from the backup process. But that cleverness is outweighed by gaping holes in what the service offers. Since Mac can’t get past versions of their files, you can get burned if you delete something and want it back a few days later. Carbonite’s current failure to offer feature parity for Mac users is disappointing.
Also unfortunate is that Carbonite only allows you to get your files back via the Internet. That is, you can restore files via the preference pane or the Carbonite Website, but you can’t request a DVD or hard drive be shipped to you.
JungleDisk
JungleDisk takes a slightly different approach, both to pricing and backup method. The service offers two plans: Simply Backup and Desktop Edition. The former only backs up your files; the latter adds a Dropbox-like syncing feature that lets you mount your backup storage space like a network drive.
The Simply Backup service costs $2 per month, and the Desktop Edition costs $3 per month. But on top of those base prices, you need to pay for your storage space. JungleDisk lets you rely on either Amazon S3 or Rackspace for storage. Amazon charges 14¢ per gigabyte per month; Rackspace charges 15¢. But since Amazon also charges data transfer and data request fees and Rackspace doesn’t, Rackspace is probably the cheaper choice. Your first 5 GB of backup data are free.
If all that sounds a little complicated, that’s because it is. If you can wade through the initial complexities, though, JungleDisk has some distinct plusses. First, you can use the service with an unlimited number of computers. If you want to back up only about 20 GB of data on the Simply Backup plan, that’s about $5 per month total, which remains competitive with the other services. You can also customize how long JungleDisk keeps older versions of your files—though you must configure that manually—and of course, you must pay for the storage cost, too. And JungleDisk will back up whatever files you throw at it—applications included.
Unfortunately, though, JungleDisk’s interface doesn’t feel at all Mac-like; the software looks as if it were surgically transplanted straight from some older version of Windows. It’s usable, and you can mostly muddle your way through configuring settings like allowed bandwidth without getting lost. Sadly, choosing files to exclude is as painful as in Carbonite.
As with Carbonite, your only option for restoring old files is over the Internet; no restore DVD or hard drive option is available.
Dropbox
If you like the idea of JungleDisk’s Dropbox-esque Desktop Edition, it’s worth considering the backup abilities of Dropbox itself. While the popular (and Macworld Editor’s Choice award-winning) utility’s focus is on syncing files between multiple computers and devices, it’s a viable backup option, too. The service doesn’t offer unlimited data as an option, and you can’t get copies of your files sent to you on DVD, but it still offers some compelling features.
The free version of Dropbox offers 2 GB of storage space. You can get 50 GB for $9.99 per month (or $8.25 if you prepay for a year), and 100 GB for $19.99 per month (or $16.58 if you prepay for a year).
You install Dropbox on your Mac (and as many other Macs, PCs, and iOS devices as you’d like), and it creates a seemingly magical folder: anything you drop in that folder quickly syncs with any other computers linked to your Dropbox account. Even better, every file you sync with Dropbox is available via the Dropbox Website, too. By default, Dropbox keeps earlier revisions of your files for the past 30 days—and those revisions don’t count against your storage quota. If you pony up for the Pack-Rat option—which costs $3.99 per month or $39 per year—you get unlimited version history for all your files.
Like Carbonite, Dropbox uses tiny graphics atop your files’ icons to indicate whether the file has already synced or is currently syncing. And like JungleDisk, you can back up any kind of files you’d like to Dropbox, including software, as long as you have the space available. With Dropbox’s recent 1.0 release, the service introduced selective syncing. That means you can sync everything you put in Dropbox to the cloud, but choose which specific computers those files get synced to—making it an even more worthy of consideration.
As a pure backup solution, Dropbox seems to offer less (limited storage) for more (a higher price). But when you couple its backup abilities with its core syncing behavior and ubiquity across devices, it becomes more compelling.
CrashPlan
The last online backup solution I checked out was CrashPlan. For free, the software lets you back up your files to computers belong to your friends and family. That’s fine, and a smart way to start getting off-site backups. But since everyone’s hard drive space is at a premium, and your friends’ uptime can’t be relied upon, the for-pay online-backup plans are where the real action is.
The premium offerings are called CrashPlan+. You can choose among three options: CrashPlan+ 10 GB gives you 10 GB of storage for $2.50 per month, or as low as $1.46 per month if you prepay for four years. CrashPlan+ Unlimited removes the 10 GB cap, and can cost as much as $5 and as little as $2.92 per month. And my favorite plan is CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited, which lets you back up between 2 to 10 computers for as much as $10 and as little as $6 per month, again depending on how far in advance you prepay.
CrashPlan keeps your deleted files forever, and those files don’t count against your quota if you’re on the 10 GB plan. While most of these online backup services offer some control over how much of your bandwidth to use, none can rival the fine-grained controls that CrashPlan offers; the standalone CrashPlan software lets you set precise usage maximums for both bandwidth (over WAN and LAN connections) and total CPU utilization. Even better, you can configure unique values for those settings for when your computer is idle as opposed to when you’re using it.
The software won’t win any Apple Design Awards, but it’s smartly organized and makes configuration a snap. You can set multiple file destinations—meaning you can back up your files both to CrashPlan Central, the traditional online backup repository that the company offers, as well as other friends’ computers.
You can restore your files via a Web interface or the software itself. CrashPlan will send a hard drive with your data from between $125 and $165, depending upon how fast you need it. The service can also be configured to send you emails or messages on Twitter if your computer stops sending backups to CrashPlan properly.
The bottom lineBest Cloud Backup For Mac
These services have plenty in common, but it’s the tiniest implementation details that set some apart. You want your offsite backups to be consistent, timely, dependable, and easy to restore—and to avoid bogging down your computer while they do their thing. My data is important to me; I have years of writing, along with thousands of photos and videos of my kids. I’ve chosen to depend on a combination of CrashPlan and Dropbox, coupled with local backups. All of these services (with the possible exception of JungleDisk) are easy to get up and running, but CrashPlan and Dropbox offer substantial benefits in terms of feature set and ease of getting your data restored when needed. https://certainloverstrawberry.tumblr.com/post/631815149261602816/download-chromedriver-for-selenium-mac.
Best Backup For Mac Computer
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |