It seems there is a lot of interest in backups, and for good reason. A colleague of ours just lost a hard drive, and it hit home that we all need to really focus on backups backups backups! The quotes we give for data restore from a dead hard drive range from $500 to 10,000. What data is on your hard drive? School work? Pictures, Tax information, Important Emails, business presentations? Experts agree that the average life of a hard drive is around 5 years, but it is dangerous to rely on them after three. If your hard drive is older than this you may be on borrowed time.

Local backups have a place, but best practices suggests that is only to aggregate data for an off site backup program. It is not recommended to rely solely on local backups such as an external hard drive because those backups are not only expensive at the time of purchase, but also suffer a high rate of failure when you need them the most. Also if the place burns down or in a catastrophe the external hard drive will be destroyed too.

For local backups (to aggregate for a remote backup service) I suggest a free program called Cobian Backup (http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm). It is easy to use, and did I mention free?

Let us focus on three of the larger services and weigh the pro and cons about them.