10 Responses

1. Kevin Cox

   July 15th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

   1

   I’m stymied by this ranking, and why Carbonite and Mozy are so highly ranked. I used Carbonite for over a year. The problem with Carbonite and Mozy, as slick as they are, are that they only keep your files for 30 days after they’re deleted from your computer. This means that if you are hit by Son of Hurricane Katrina, you are unable to return to your computer until the 31st day and your harddrive is gone, your external storage drive is gone, — ALL of your files are gone, and they are unable to restore them. I lost some irreplaceable business files this way. This is NOT a “backup” solution, it’s a temporary storage solution.

   I’m also confused as to why so many of these companies make it so hard to get an answer to the most basic question: How much storage space do I get, and for how much money? They try to entice you with awesome features and slick interfaces and promotions (get 2GB free!) but they avoid the most basic question.

   For the best price to performance to storage features ratio, I don’t think the Amazon S3 solution can be beat, especially that offered by Elephant Drive. Unlimited REAL backup storage for $5 a month — the same price as Carbonite/Mozy — with all the advanced backup, sharing, and web access features, plus encrypted storage options, geographic redundancy, and the strength of Amazon — how could one go wrong? Its interfaces may not be the slickest, but for my money, I’ll go with Elephant Drive any day over any of the others — I checked them out. It simply works.

2. Dave Engle

   July 16th, 2008 at 9:36 am

   2

   @Kevin Cox:

   I’m not sure where you got your information, but Mozy does NOT delete files after 30 days. It synchronizes your backup directories to your computer. It is not unlimited online storage, it is simply a backup service. If you delete a file from your computer, it’s no longer going to be backed up.

   If you’re hit by Son of Katrina and your computer is down, all your files will be there when you get a computer up and running again and you re-install Mozy.

   I’ve been using Mozy for a year or so now, and have used Mozy to restore files twice. It worked perfectly and I would recommend Mozy to anyone.

3. Raphael

   July 17th, 2008 at 2:17 am

   3

   @Kevin and Dave

   Mozy is great. But if you delete a file from your computer, you have 30 days to retrieve it from the mozy backups otherwise they delete it also. Other than that your files are not going anywhere.

4. Gregory

   July 17th, 2008 at 2:50 pm

   4

   Is the list on the “Top 25″ in order of rank, with the “best” at the top?

   Does Carbonite back up system files, or do any of them do that, so that I could have absolutely everything backed up in case of total disaster?

   Thank you for a great site.

5. Mark

   July 18th, 2008 at 12:43 am

   5

   Mozy appears to be going through major growing pains. Earlier this year I had amazing customer support and got at least another 30 users onto Mozy. I had another problem a month later and even though I was working with the same tech support person and the service was crap. My problem last 2 1/2 months with the backup not working right. I spent 20+ hours during this time trying tips and solutions without success.

   I asked for a refund and it was applied to my CC within hours.

   Tried Spider Oak - my backups seemed to hang and I could see the status of what was backing up. Didn’t invest anymore time on this product.

   I’m moving my online backup’s to Carbonite. Their client doesn’t seem to hammer the CPU as hard and I tested a restore that worked fine. On the downside they don’t seem to offer a DVD service if I need to restore all of my data quickly.

   If Carbonite doesn’t work, I will move to Angel backup. There are a lot of positive comments on the web about Angle Backup and hope they get a review here.

   If Mozy can get through their growth, they will be a decent solution.

6. Kato

   July 27th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

   6

   Mark, have a look at onlinedatastore, they only charge monthly, 4.95 for a 150gb account and you can cancel at any time. They offer a DVD seedload (use their software to copy data to a DVD and they will transfer) so you don’t have that massive upload and dvd restore. I have used them for over 6 months and they have never let me down.

7. Mike

   July 29th, 2008 at 2:30 am

   7

   I tried Mozy, so slow speed to upload. And what worst, it cannot pass through my office’s proxy. Carbonite, even annouce they dont support proxy…

8. Frustrated

   July 30th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

   8

   Well after testing several clients I have eliminated Carbonite since their restore speeds are 300MB/hour (which is normal per Carbonite support). Another thing is that Carbonite’s phone support closes at 4PM ET! Carbonite email support takes 3 days for a reply.

   I have also elminated Mozy Home Backup. I had the same error message trying to get their application to install properly on two diffierent computers here and their email support takes a week to get back to you.

   It is down to IDrive and JungleDisk.

9. Scott

   July 30th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

   9

   I noticed that last month admin stated that an internal matrix was used. Couldn’t this be posted online for the benefit of those viewing your monthly rankings? As Gregory stated earlier this month, it isn’t at all clear what the rankings indicate. Is the list based on revenue, users, best service?

10. appovabus

    August 3rd, 2008 at 12:55 am

    10

    It’s amazing