Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

Have you ever lost your data in a PC crash or when your hard disk went dead ? I had that experience about 3 years ago and since then, I've knock myself on the head and tried many types of backups. I've gone out to buy DVD / CDRW writers, thumbdrives ( I have 4 in the house) and 5 hard disks to keep all my precious photos, personal documents for the next 30 years of my life. It's not an easy thing and it gets tiring to manage my CD collection and keeping my house dust free can be a pain. So I've gone out to look on the internet for some online file backup services and let other people take care of the storage management. All I have to do it just get an internet connection and pay the money.

 

1. Carbonite - Office Backup Service (Coming Soon)
They offer Online Photo Storage at $29.95 per year with a free 3 months trial and will eventually even have an Office Backup Service later to save all your precious business or personal documents online.

According to David Friend, CEO of Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com), “A real backup service ought to find all your pictures automatically and just back them up without the user having to think about it. To upload 2,800 photos to a service like Kodak’s EasyShare requires you to hand-select each of the 2,800 photos. It would take days of constant work. And you need to remember to repeat that process every time you take new pictures. People just don’t do it – it’s too much of a pain.” Carbonite’s approach is different. “What we do,” explains Jeff Flowers, co-founder and CTO, “is scan your disk looking for any pictures to back up. It’s completely automatic. Any time you put some new photos on your PC, Carbonite finds them within seconds and starts to back them up over the Internet. When the little Carbonite icon turns green, that means that every photo on your PC is safely backed up on our servers in a secure location. If your PC gets stolen or your house burns down, you can easily get all your photos back from us. And we encrypt those photos before they leave your PC so that no one but you can see them. Obviously the photo printing and photo sharing web sites can’t do that.”

2. Oxyshare.com Free File Hosting
Oxyshare offers free file hosting but they will delete the files if its not accessed within 30 days. They just launched on February 1, 2006. Oxyshare.com, a brand new hosting service facilitating free file hosting and file sharing, launched February 1 and is driven to become the premier file utility site on the Internet. Users can upload files to Oxyshare.com and access them on any other computer without using disks, flash drives or any other device.

Among Oxyshare.com's other notable features for the free accounts are: file sizes of up to 700 MB; unlimited upload speeds; e-mail file delivery; support for pausing and resuming downloads.

Premium account users have access to the following upgrades: download speeds of 200 MB/sec; Unlimited upload speeds; FTP accelerator; Support for e-mail delivery; 90 days hosting if there are no download requests.

3. IBackup for Windows
IBackup.com provides storage management and online backup for Windows, Linux, Mac, SQL , Microsoft Exchange and even  a System State backup to recover the critical system components after a crash. Their service is quite expensive but they've been around since 2003 and even PC Magazine gave them good reviews. With IBackup, Consumers and Organizations of all sizes can have the same enterprise-class data protection Fortune 500 uses to safeguard its critical information at a fraction of cost. IBackup offers all the standard features, such as scheduled backups, data compression, data encryption (on the server and in transit over the Internet), and incremental backups.