Lab

Online Backup

MIT professor and Internet guru Nicholas Negroponte once paid a visit to a large corporation and, as might be expected, was taking his laptop with him. On the way in, the security guard on the desk asked if he was bringing in a computer, and if so - for insurance purposes - how much it was worth. Taking a look at the rather ordinary machine in his bag, Negroponte replied, 'About two or three million dollars.'

Not surprisingly, the security guard was somewhat taken aback by this, until Negroponte explained that the machine itself was a mere couple of thousand, whereas what was truly valuable - and, in fact, irreplaceable - was the data on it.

Despite this, most people never stop to think about the amount of irreplaceable data on their hard disk. If you're a business user, you might have a vague understanding of the value of what you carry around with you, perhaps thanks to an IT support person drilling into your head the importance of backing it all up. But even home users will have files on their machines that are extremely valuable. The machine I'm typing this on contains not only 38GB of music, lovingly copied from my CD collection, but digital photographs that couldn't be replaced if they were lost.

Given this, it's easy to see why backing up your files is more important than ever before. Those pictures you took with that new digital camera on the birth of your first child could never be remade. So if you aren't backing them up, why?

The answer is probably because although the principle of backing up is simple - copy files onto something other than your own computer - it can be a pain to do. A decade ago you could back up everything important onto one or two floppy disks, but with new hard disks now in the range of 40GB to 250GB, you'd need anything up to 60 DVDs to back them up, which would make it an expensive and time-consuming business.

Why online?

The general principle of backing up is to make it as simple as possible, and with minimum involvement for the user. The ideal backup system is set up once, and you never touch it again (unless you need to restore something from backup, or need to add another machine or hard disk to what you're backing up). And there are many good software packages that allow you to do this kind of backup, usually to a second hard disk, either fitted internally or connected externally using USB 2 or FireWire.

These backup methods have a lot going for them. External hard disks are cheap, and can be used with multiple machines if you buy one that's large enough. If you need more storage, you can simply replace the external disk with one that's even bigger, and use the old backup drive as extra storage.

But backing up to a hard disk has one major disadvantage: it doesn't make you immune from complete disaster - and complete disaster isn't as rare as people tend to think. If a fire guts your house, you'll lose everything, as both computer and backup will be gone. If a burglar steals your computer, he'll also be likely to take anything attached to it, including your backup disk. And if a power surge fries your machine, it could also fry anything else attached to it. Of course, you could remove your drive every night and hide it somewhere safe, but remembering to do that, and remembering to put it back the next day, is an extra step that will ultimately prevent you from backing up every day.

So an ideal backup system wouldn't rely on a drive in your house. Instead, you'd have at least one copy of your backup offsite, in a secure location that would be immune from damage even if you lost the entire contents of your house. And thanks to the Internet, offsite backup can be as cheap and easy as copying everything to a hard disk.

The cost factor

Given the profit-making potential of online backup, it's no surprise there are a slew of services around that allow you to back up your machine to a server on the Internet. Prices vary, largely according to the amount of data you want to store, but all of them charge a monthly fee rather than a one-off single payment. However, depending on the amount of data you want to store, this can be as little as a few pounds per month, which means you could get several years' worth of backup for the price of a hard drive and some backup software. Unless you're backing up a lot of data, online backup can easily be as cheap as any other method.

If you're backing up a lot of files, though, online backup systems are relatively expensive, with some services costing hundreds or even thousands of pounds per year for multi-gigabytes of data. This means if you want to store a lot of digital media files, which tend to be rather large, it will almost certainly be much cheaper to back up to an external hard disk. Until services drop in price, you're not going to be backing up a PC with 10,000 songs on it over the Internet.

Even if you fall into this category, online backup may be worth looking at for a more limited role. All the services we look at here allow you to limit what you're backing up to a specific set of folders or files, which means you could easily set up a backup system that uses both an external hard disk - for large digital media files - and an online service for smaller documents. This would allow you to do a daily backup of important documents, while backing up music and images to a hard disk on a weekly basis.

Of course, there's also the additional cost of your Internet connection. You want a fast, always-on connection to do proper online backup: trying to do this using a V.90 modem is an exercise in futility. Instead, a broadband connection of at least 512Kb/sec is essential, and the faster the better.

But even with a very fast connection, backing up over the Internet isn't quick. You're going to be transferring at the very least hundreds of megabytes of data, and the first time you do it it's going to be a job to run overnight. Thankfully, though, online backup services use incremental backup sets, which means only files that have been changed will be transferred when you run your daily backup. This means that, if you're not changing a lot of data every day, you can easily schedule a daily backup, which will take only a few minutes.

There's one other limitation of most online backup services: they only work with a single machine. If you have more than one computer in the house, you're going to have to buy multiple accounts, which can make it a ridiculously expensive business.

Trustworthy computing

Of course, if you're going to use an online backup service, it has to be one that you can trust. Your data, as we've said, is the most valuable part of your computer, so trusting it to a third party is a big step to take.

The first thing to consider is the quality of the service. You don't want to trust your data to a company that's either a fly-by-night service, or likely to go out of business leaving you without a backup. But in most cases -and for all the companies we've looked at here - this shouldn't be a problem. Most firms also allow you to trial their service with either a limited amount of data or for a limited time period, so you can assess if the performance and reliability is up to scratch.

The reliability and security of the service is a key part of ensuring you get the right backup. You need to know that the data you send over the Internet isn't being snooped on by anyone else, as you may be backing up important and sensitive documents. You also need to know your data is being received correctly, and that there's a level of data integrity - the worst possible scenario would be paying for a backup service, having to restore a file, and finding that, thanks to the unreliability of data transmission over the Internet, it's a corrupt version. To this end, most services include error-correcting checks to ensure your files are stored perfectly.

For extra security you may want to check if your data is encrypted on the servers, so that - even if they wanted to - the company providing the service couldn't access it. Although the likelihood of anyone attempting to read your data at a professional company is minimal, if you're storing particularly sensitive files - such as lists of credit card numbers - it's worth checking with the company involved.

But what happens if your data is lost? Not all companies have insurance for their customers' data, as it's an extremely difficult thing to insure. How valuable is your data? How valuable is the combined data of all the customers of a service? Without knowing this, it's hard to see how it's possible to insure customers against loss. However, one thing to check is how often your service provider backs up itself. You want to ensure that your backup is backed up, which it should be in any professional service. All of the services we looked at here back up their data on at least a daily basis.

One other option offered by some providers is multiple backups. This allows you to keep specific numbers of older versions of files, so that, for example, you can keep the last three backups of a document. This allows you to go back to an older version if you need to, and can be a good option for some users.

Something for everyone

Whether online backup is the best option for you depends on the kind of data you're using, and how regularly it changes. If you're a video professional, creating multiple gigabytes of data per day, backing up over the Internet is going to be too time consuming and expensive unless you have a very fast connection and a lot of money to spend. If you're a home user with tens of gigabytes of music, again it may be simply too expensive and slow to use - although here, a mixed strategy of backing up big media files to an external hard disk and smaller documents online may work very well.

For a small business of one or two people and only one or two machines, online backup is ideal. It offers all the advantages of a professional, offsite backup service with more ease of use than a homegrown system. For these users, it makes backup a worry-free and simple process, and is a highly recommended solution.

Where online backup really comes into its own is in mobile computing. Thanks to the almost-ubiquitous nature of high-speed broadband access in hotels, combined with free or low-cost wireless access elsewhere, it's simple to run an application and backup your important documents wherever you are. This is a much better solution than having to carry a portable hard disk around with you to back up to, as it protects you from losing your laptop bag, complete with both computer and backup, and being left with nothing.

The services we've looked at here are oriented towards a variety of customers and have a wide range of prices, perhaps reflecting the differing possible customers. However, it also illustrates the potential of online backup, both now and in the future. It's easy to see how there might come a time when, thanks to increased connection speeds and lower costs, everyone will back up to a secure server somewhere on the Internet. Meanwhile, if you're one of the people for whom online backup is a viable option, you're in a very lucky position indeed: you'll never have to worry about losing your data again.