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In honor of the fact that I am writing this while at Macworld Expo, I thought I would point out an article from Macworld’s website.

DocumentSnap reader Brooke (a name that doesn’t at all bring back painful childhood taunting memories) pointed out this article: Which online backup service is right for you?.

If you’re thinking of choosing an online backup, it is a pretty good comparison.

If you don’t back up your Mac’s files, then it’s a matter of when—not if—you’ll lose data that’s precious to you. Apple already robbed Mac users of any excuse not to back up regularly with Time Machine. But a single bad power surge, or a true disaster like fire or vicious weather, could render your Time Machine backups worthless.

Fortunately, off-site backup is easier than ever. A slew of Web services offer affordable online backup for your Mac. These services are often simple to use as well: you install software from the service on your computer, and it backs up your files over the Internet. By keeping current copies of your treasured data far away from your home, you can feel far more confident that your files are safe.

The article runs through Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, Jungle Disk, Dropbox, and Crashplan. Even though it is a Macworld article, all of those services are cross-platform.

Do you disagree with any of their points, or do you love a service that they didn’t mention? Lets hear about it in the comments.

A while ago, a reader (Boba Fett to be exact – I guess intergalactic bounty hunters need to back their stuff up too) suggested that amongst the other backup providers that I mention, I should talk about CrashPlan.

Since I know better than to cross the Fett (look what happened to Han), that’s exactly what I will do.

Cross Platform

Being a Mac dude, I appreciate when companies don’t just make software for Windows (though I understand when they do). I was pretty impressed that CrashPlan made their client not just for Windows and Mac, but for Linux and Open Solaris too.

Handles Both Local (For Free!) And Online Backup

One of the decisions people usually make when they think about backing up their computer (if they think about it at all) is whether to back up to an external drive, or whether to back up online.

CrashPlan handles both. The free CrashPlan software will let you automatically back up your stuff to an external USB drive or even to another computer.

The “other computer” part is kind of interesting. Chris over at Solo Technology has taken a clever approach using this.

Now, most of the computers I and family members own tend to have way more hard drive space than we need, so now we’re all hosting each other’s backups.

Here’s what I’ve got setup so far:

• My laptop backs up to my home machine. The backups are fast when both are on at home on the local network. Normally I wouldn’t want backups to be so close to where the machine is at night, but the “key” data on the laptop is also in DropBox so this is acceptable for now (until my little web of backups grows).
• My Home machine backs up to my mother’s machine – 700 miles away.
• Mother backs up to my home machine.
• Father backs up to my home machine.
• Wife is still on Mozy.

As I work on other family member machines I’ll be adding them to the “mesh” as well and continue to aim for geographically diverse options.

It, of course, has an Online Backup service called CrashPlan Central. If you just want to back up one computer it is $4.50/month, or if you want to do the unlimited family thing, it is $8.33/month. If you buy multiple years at once there is a discount.

Get The Party Started

As I’ve written about before, one of the problems with online backup is that the initial backup can take forever to transfer that stuff up to the cloud.

CrashPlan has a pretty clever option where for $125, they’ll send you a 1 TB drive. You can back up your stuff to the drive and mail it back, and they will restore it to your online account in one shot. More details about that here.

“I’m Big On Twitter”

Aside from Boba’s recommendation, I have seen a number of great comments about CrashPlan on Twitter. You can check out a search to see what people say about it.

All in all, CrashPlan looks like a good option if you want to do both offline and online backup. If you have any thoughts/comments/reviews of it, leave a message in the comments!

If you are a user of Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage service, you have probably come across CloudBerry Explorer, which is a tool for managing your S3 data.

Well, now the team from that product have taken the next step and have a new product in Beta called CloudBerry Online Backup which, not surprisingly, acts as a front-end for Amazon S3.

I personally am a big fan of Amazon S3. Even if you are nervous about storing your data “in the cloud” with some startup company, in the case of S3, its pretty unlikely that Amazon is going anywhere any time soon.

Currently, CloudBerry Backup is Windows-only, and of course an Amazon S3 account is required.

Installing CloudBerry Backup is pretty simple. Once you do you are greeted with a welcome screen.

It has easy to access buttons for doing a Backup and a Restore, and helpfully comes with Backup Plans (what you set up to tell CloudBerry what to backup when) already defined for My Pictures, My Documents, and My Internet Bookmarks.

When you first install, you will be asked to set up your Amazon account.

If you don’t already have an account, they have a link to set one up. I know some less technical users might have a hard time wrapping their head around this step, but with S3 there isn’t really a way around it (that I can think of). CloudBerry does a good job in helping the user along and pointing them where they need to go.

Setting Up Backup

Setting up the backup is pretty easy. They use a wizard system to take you step by step.

The first step is a tree where you can choose the directories you want to back up.

Next you can choose whether you want to backup all files or just certain types (or exclude certain types).

The next step will be good for privacy-conscious people. You can choose to compress or encrypt your files on upload. They have a ton of different options for encryption, which are too many to list here but suffice it to say there are a lot.

You also have the option to purge files (if you choose). You can purge versions of files older than a certain number of days, or only keep the last x versions of a file.

Finally, of course, you can choose the schedule that the backup runs on.

Running The Backup

When you run a backup, you get a progress report (of course), and then once it is done you can check the history, either for all backups, or for each backup plan.

Restoring

Restoring is also done via a wizard. You can bring back the latest version of a file, or bring it back to a certain point in time (great feature), or of course you can also choose it manually.

What’s Next?

Of course, this is a Beta, and CloudBerry is still working on some new features. The first is to create a virtual disk so that your S3 backup looks like a drive on your computer.

They will also be adding estimates for storage costs. This is a great idea. One of the problems with using S3 as backup is you really don’t know for sure how much your backup is going to cost. Sure you can sit there and use Amazon’s calculator, but who wants to do that? If CloudBerry can estimate before uploading, that would be great.

They’ll also be expanding to support Azure and Sun Cloud storage. This is a smart move to not be tied to one provider and give people choice.

So, if you want to check out the CloudBerry Online Backup beta, go here. Anyone else using Amazon S3 for their backup?

One company that I have been meaning to write about for quite some time is SpiderOak, which is an online backup and sync provider I have been hearing a lot of good things about.

Cross Platform

While other online backup providers have been Windows-only until just recently, SpiderOak has been cross platform right from the start. They have clients for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware).

In addition, they provide remote access over the web so you can get at your files from any web device.

What is ‘Zero Knowledge?’

It goes without saying (or does it) that an online backup company needs to have security in mind.

SpiderOak takes this to the next level by having a zero-knowledge policy. What does this mean? Aside from strong encryption, which they have, the company never stores or sees your password or encryption keys.

One of their FAQs is “could you read a user’s data if forced at gunpoint?” and the answer (they say) is no.

This is a big benefit if you are concerned about privacy of online backups, but of course it does have one downside. If you forget your password, you are completely and totally on your own. The company can’t help you, because they don’t know your password in the first place. (You can set a password hint, so I strongly recommend setting a good one!).

Not just backup

SpiderOak doesn’t limit itself to just online backup. They are in the sync-ing game too. If you are familiar with Dropbox, it is the same sort of deal. You can sync files across multiple machines automatically, and do it cross-platform between Mac, Windows, and Linux as well.

Pricing

The pricing is tiered. The first 2 Gigs are free, which is great if you don’t have too much to store. After that, pricing is in 100 Gig increments. It’s $10/month for the first 100 GB, and then $10/month additional for each 100 GB on top of that.

They have yearly discounts so if you buy a full year, it is $100.

Sync-ing wise, SpiderOak is cheaper than DropBox which is also free up to 2GB, but then $9.99/month for 50 GB and $19.99/month for 100 GB.

Geeks Make The World Go Around

One thing I like about SpiderOak is that you get the sense that it is run by people who really care about making good software and giving back to the software community. It sounds cheesy, but I love the fact that they have an “Engineering Matters” section of their website that describes what is going on in techie terms, and that they give back tools and code to the open source community.

If you are looking for online backup or syncing software, you definitely want to make sure SpiderOak is one of the ones you look at.

In the last few weeks, two online backup services, HP Upline and Yahoo Briefcase have both announced that they are closing.

While some have said that this is a sign that the online backup market is not sustainable, both Mozy and Carbonite have been clever and used it as an opportunity .

Nate from Mozy has posted a blog post entitled “Hey Upline Users, We Love You!” giving a discount code to ex-Upline users.

Dave Friend, co-founder and CEO of Carbonite, has posted two blog posts: one on Yahoo Briefcase and one on HP Upline, discussing the decision to close both.

By the way, I really appreciate the fact that Dave personally blogs and shares his insight. It’s great.

What do you think, is Upline and Briefcase a sign of things to come, or is it just separating the wheat from the chaff?

Wow, there was a shakeup in the online backup space today. Rackspace, a well-known web hosting provider has bought Jungle Disk, an online backup provider. The cloud backup space is heating up.

Jungle Disk provides an interface to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service, which makes this deal a little strange.

Many people think that Rackspace is making this move because they want to better compete against Amazon Web Services, which makes sense, but that is exactly what Jungle Disk uses to store users’ files.

For its part, Jungle Disk says that Amazon S3 will continue to be supported:

Does this mean you will discontinue support for Amazon S3?

Absolutely not. Although Jungle Disk will now also be supporting Rackspace’s Cloud Files, we are still committed to supporting Amazon S3 and other potentially cloud storage providers in both current and future products. Being able to support multiple cloud storage providers is one of the unique differentiators for Jungle Disk and a big reason why Rackspace was interested in acquiring the company.

Even though S3 will continue to be supported (and it would be pretty brutal for their clients if it was not), you have to think that much of the focus is going on be on supporting Rackspace’s cloud offerings.

We will see how this shakes out. Now that Mozy has been bought by EMC and Jungle Disk by Rackspace, I wonder if Carbonite will be next.