Internet Backup Tools

Did you know?

• Human error causes 32% of data loss
• Somewhere in the world, a hard-drive crashes every 15 seconds
• 2,000 laptops are stolen every day
• 72% of businesses that suffer major data loss disappear within 24 months

A rapidly growing trend is the use of the Internet as a backup system. Just do a quick search of the Net using the keywords "Internet Backup" to see a few of the many companies now offering free or paid services -- the latter, often with 30-day free trials.

Free Webspace

Back in the heady days of the dot-com boom, there were dozens of companies offering free file-hosting sites. A few of the ones we've tested over the years include Juston (now defunct), Xoom (ditto), iDrive (kaput), FreeSpace (defunct; now a generic search site), Homestead (no longer free), Geocities (now owned by Yahoo), FortuneCity (no longer free), Tripod (now owned by Lycos, the company is focusing on "Tripod "Plus," which carries a small monthly fee), Freebox (apparently defunct, after months of having a message saying "undergoing major changes" on its home page) and FreeDiskSpace (? - it now resolves to a page at www.electricscooterdepot.com).

Another notable business failure was i-drive.com, the Internet hard drive company founded in 1998, funded in part by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Switzerland's Partners Group and officially launched worldwide in mid-1999.  The service, at its peak, claimed more than 200,000 registered user accounts and partnerships with several of the nation's top universities including Stanford, UCLA, UC Berkeley and Case Western Reserve.

Touted as more than a virtual desktop, i-drive originally provided 25 MB free online storage space to users, claiming to be the only service that allows users to access, transfer, share, gather and publish any type of content (text, images, MP3, South Park video clips) with a simple right click. Filo, its unique Web-clipping tool, allowed users to save Web content as files, keeping all the links and metadata intact. And they signed interesting partnerships with several popular content sites... until the dot-com bubble burst and, with it, this and many other shaky dot-com business models.

Things started to go downhill in Jan. 2000, when the company announced InfiniteSpace, a service which promised to remove "all limits on the amount of Web content its members can store in their i-drive accounts." i-drive.com, the company (falsely) claimed, "is the only Web-based service that enables users to capture and store any content from the Internet and is now the only service offering unlimited storage for anything taken from the Web." Needless to say, this left investors scratching their heads as to how the company would avoid being grossly taken advantage of -- and lawyers on all sides licking their chops. With this move, i-drive.com aimed at completely redefining the market, but they ended up putting themselves out of business.

Here are details on a few other former free offerings:

Corel in late 1999 launched a free service called Corel vDrive. It provided up to 20 MB of free storage for users of any operating system capable of running Netscape or IE version 4 or later, with cookies enabled. The vDrive could transfer a maximum of five files in a session. Unfortunately, this huge limitation seems to have killed any possible viability the system might have had -- the service closed down in 2001.

In Jan., 2000, Apple launched a service called "iDisk" for Mac users (and, perhaps unintentionally, Windows users, who subsequently discovered they could access it using standard WebDAV protocols). The iDisk shows up on the Mac desktop and acts like a normal, albeit slow, drive. Apple regularly posts software updates and other goodies to its users' iDisks. A recent addition is a vast library of free-use MP3 music clips from FreePlayMusic.com. Details at www.apple.com. Apple in Aug. 2002 began charging for the formerly free service, as part of its US$99/year .Mac subscription service. This fee also includes a simple internet-based backup utility that makes it easy to synchronize data on two Macs.

In short: Every one of these internet storage providers is now out of the free webspace business.

The lesson here is: Internet backups carry their own risks. We recommend caution when evaluating remote storage, or indeed, any untested backup medium. The potential for security risks, such as interception of transmitted data, exists. The company handling the backup might disappear, along with your data. Our advice is to keep a remote backup on CD or a local LAN-connected drive, as well.

Fortunately, not all internet backup systems have vanished. SwapDrive.com (http://www.swapdrive.com) is a free Internet hard drive which allows users to access and share their important documents from anywhere in the world. You could, for example, use it to receive an email attachment or solve the problem of a file left at the office. It could also prove useful to work on stories from many locations, to backup your files or to collaborate on projects.

With that said, the best Internet backup system we've found is from everywaresolutions.com. It's incredibly easy to set up and manage and not too expensive, starting at around C$10 per month. Currently, it supports Windows clients only.

One particularly interesting feature is an "erase on exit" feature that could be used if you were visiting a client's office and wanted to download a presentation or document on his or her PC. You'd simply download the 1.86MB Everyware Backup/Restore client, install it and connect to your online backup account, where any or all of your stored files can be selected for downloading onto the system you are using. When "Erase on Exit" is selected in the preference, all evidence of the file(s) you download will be removed from the computer when you quit the program. It's a minor convenience, yes, but it exemplifies the style of thinking that seems to permeate Everyware Backup: it's all designed to be extremely efficient and as dead simple as possible. Backups, once established, are incrementally updated for maximum bandwidth efficiency. All Internet communications are encrypted for optimal security. Recommended.

For Windows PCs, a similar service is xDrive. It provides up to 100 MB of free storage (25MB free upon initial signup, with extra storage credits available as rewards for referrals and frequent users) http://www.xdrive.com. Like the Mac's iDisk, xDrive for Windows is accessible directly from the desktop; it looks and acts like a standard storage device. And, hey, it's still in business. That's gotta count for something.

Search Altavista.com

• StoragePoint's Click-n-Go Office - Free Internet Backup
• ZDnet: One-Button Internet Backup
• CMP: Planet IT Storage TechCenter- Checklist- Internet Backup Services
• Easy.Backup.com offers optional CD-ROM recovery discs.
• NovaNet-WEB - The Online Backup Software Solution - performs incremental backups by only sending the changes that have been made to data files.
• Saf-T-Net Remote Secure encrypted Automatic Data Backup Services
• Shareware:  Island CodeWorks Internet Backup Registration
• PC Magazine Editor's Choices: Web Backup (April 8, 1997)
• For the iMac: iMacbackup.com
• TechTV.com: Prevent Extreme Data Disaster
• Slashdot: Backup strategies