When 2 GB is insufficient to store the massive number of photographs, emails, documents and other important files that are piled up on your hard drive, you can go for a subscription based service. Subscription Based Online Backup Services Hopefully this will change in future versions. While Dropbox is also an awesome service for file synchronization and online backup, it has one major limitation – it will only backup files and folders that are placed inside the Dropbox folder. SugarSync is available for Mac and Windows while ZumoDrive also offers a Linux client. They offer almost an identical set of features and are extremely easy to configure. Of all these services, my favorites are SugarSync and ZumoDrive. Once your files are backed up, you can also access them online except in Mozy. If you only have a limited amount of data (< 2 GB) on your computer that you want to store in the cloud, any of the following backup services should solve your problem without you having to shell out a penny.Īll the above online backup services (except for SkyDrive) work in a similar way – you download a small client to your desktop, mark the local folders that you want to backup online and the tool will automatically monitor and upload files from these folders to the cloud. It is therefore recommended that you switch to an online backup service – these are inexpensive and will automatically copy your computer’s data over the Internet to a more secure off-site location (aka the data center) in near real-time without your involvement. The other disadvantage is that local backups don’t always happen in real-time. While it is easy to create a local backup of your computer, the physical media where you are storing the backups, like the DVDs or external disk, may not be very reliable in the long term. This week I have been testing the various online backup services, both paid and free, and here’s a summary of how these service compare against each other.

Personal computer backup services