By Gerry Blackwell
May 28, 2008

Online backup is a great idea; your data is stored offsite, most services let you set up automatic, unattended backups. And you can restore data from any computer connected to the Internet.

You do have to trust the company you’re dealing with, though, and many of the companies offering online backup services for small businesses are little-known start-ups. But now a trusted name in computer security, Symantec Corp., maker of the Norton anti-virus and Internet security products, offers a backup service of its own.

Symantec Online Backup, priced as low as $10 a month for 10 gigabytes (GB) of storage, is the first of a planned suite of online services built on the company’s Symantec Network Protection platform. Symantec designed the service for small and medium-size businesses and made it simple enough to configure and use that even non-technical personnel can manage it.

You can back up as many computers as you want and pay a fixed amount per month for a given amount of data – 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500 or 1,000-plus GB – plus a certain amount per gigabyte for “overage,” if your backups take more than the contracted amount of space.

We tested the sign-up, configuration, backup and recovery processes and came away impressed – although with a few reservations.

Simplicity

The sign-up process is a matter of …

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