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17 Online File Storage Services Tested
prostoalex writes "PC World reviewed 17 online file storage services. According to the summary: 'Of the 17 services we tried, our favorite backup service is IBackup, while the GoDaddy Online File Folder is our pick of the storage sites. And for sharing files, we like the free 4shared.com service.'" They're also thoughtful enough to include a warning about the pitfalls of saving your data online.
...there's a printer friendly version with the entire article on one page, so you don't have to click through 458 different pages, each with its own half-sentence of the article on it.
.Mac service is missing. It provides AFP, WebDAV, and web-based access for Mac (and Windows) users, as well as online file storage, online file, calendar, mail, and preference syncing, online backup, and the normal collection of web and email services.
I'd also note that Apple's
I've been waiting a long time for the arrival of internet storage -- I'd much rather let someone else manage the integrity and provide peace of mind.
Concerns about services going out of business, security, their own data integrity aside for the moment (but NOT to be ignored), these listed and reviewed services still far exceed prices I'm (and I'm guessing many others) willing to pay. I easily have 100+GB I would like guaranteed safe and ongoing synced and always backed up.
For now, I continue to maintain multiple hard drives on multiple machines with scripts that maintain backups, not easy, but effective and way more cost effective. And I expect soon NAS will come down in price enough to easily compete with any internet service -- of course internet services should come down in price too.
Sigh... always just waiting for that tipping point, that threshold, but at the same time seeing my requirements always slightly ahead of that threshold... pictures get bigger, videos get easier, and my mp3 collections (ripped from my own CDs) is a given constant.
Also for large internet storage, the big-pipe problem remains. I want an online storage from which I have reasonably unencumbered upload and download access. It would also be nice to see full T1 speeds at least (something not accessible to normal DSL or even cable subscribers). Don't know if and when that gets solved, and if solved how much additional expense is incurred. Sigh again.
Except that if a fire took out your office, your carefully installed harddrive would be gone too.
We use iBackup. Nightly pgp-encrypted backups, and we sleep soundly knowing that if the bottom-most server on the rack catches fire and slags everything above it, that we can get new gear running, pull the data back down, decrypt it (after manually typing the key in from the printout stored in one of two offsite vaults, if necessary) and be live again in days.
A perfect place to put your data. And for only $4.95 per year more, they'll make it private.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm kind of dissappointed they didn't look at http://www.esnips.com/. I know it's still beta, but 1 Gb storage free look like the best one going.
For businesses wanting online storage and sharing of files, an obvious contender not mentioned in the article is Microsoft's Sharepoint, which is available as a hosted service from a number of providers such as Apptix (who have a free 30-day trial).
Reminds me of a scene in The Turing Option where the main character has to physically make a trip to an out of country data dump to retrieve some bad mojo. This leads to a question of where the posts data dumps are located? Which jurisdictions do they fall under and therefore what laws? ;) ).
And relatedly when gigabit connections become common sometime in the future you could keep your mp3's or divx movies in a dump and not notice any latency accessing them when the net isn't down (
Shh.
I'm still pissed about MySpace. I uploaded all 10MB of my pirated mp3s there back in 1999 (I also used IDrive until they too sold out). Now MySpace is just a cesspool of bad web design and a mirror of our vapid post-millennial American excuse for a culture.
I want my 10MB back.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Anyone who takes thier data seriously would never think of doing such a thing. You have no idea what happens when your files get copied to some third party network.
I know a lot of people that use their webmail accounts in this manner (yahoo, hotmail, etc) where if they think they need to be access a file somewhere else, they'll just e-mail it to themselves in an attachment. In all honesty though, the adoption rate for something like this for home personal users isn't going to ramp up until the average upload speeds of a home connection increases. Especially for large files, too many Joe Computer users are going to think their computer froze just because it's taking so long to upload their files.
What?! No review of Gmail Filesystem?
about five years ago a friend turned me to streamload for file sharing. I tried it out and didn't like the fact that i had to get people to send the files to me through unaffiliated forums, so I quit. However a year later, I was going to Australia for an unknown amount of time, but i couldn't Bing my HD. I turned to streamload once again but this time for file hosting. Now I use it for file sharing, and back-ups when I need to (currently in Japan, so it helped a lot.) Their new service is a little buggy still but over all Streamload is the way i would go. It is cheap as follows:
- Basic Account - $4.95/month or $44.95/year - Unlimited Storage
Download Up to 2 GB/mo.
- Standard Account $9.95/month or $99.95/year - Unlimited Storage
Download Up to 25 GB/mo.
and it goes all the way up too:
Premium Account $39.95/month or $399.95/year - Unlimited Storage
Download Up to 100 GB/mo.
Or even terrabytes for businesses (a state university in America, I believe, Uses a fair percentage of streamload)
http://streamload.com/
Stremaload also allows you to host files for people that do not have Streamload accounts. The downloads are cheap and the uploads are quick. (By the way. My streamload account has more then 40 terrabytes of things that i can download.)
That's why I just use http://www.dropload.com/ when I want to move big files around.
iBackup is a datacenter. I'd be surprised it they didn't have a nice Halon system in place. They can afford the kind of site-based protection that smaller offices can't. Also, as other posters have mentioned, if they do have a fire it only takes out the backup. As long as your live systems are working, you can backup to somewhere else. Data in 2 places is more secure against loss (but more vulnerable to theft/unauthorised access) than data in 1 place.
Unfortunate that the review doesn't mention S3 or JungleDisk as those are excellent options for these same things and are much cheaper for most uses than e.g. GoDaddy. Their open source clients do lots of nice caching and encrypting as well.
Ifolders rocks. It's different in that everybody has the files locally but all files are synced. Cross platform too. Really great and open source.
evil is as evil does
at least Mozy does, even in their free offering.
Why are we discussing the merits of 17 different online storage services when you can host your own for pennies? Mine is a PII 75Mhz that I bought for $25 and it's sitting 3 feet away from me.
Oh, and if you'll excuse me:
If I scramble my data with a password using well-examined software before I send it to the remote storage, I don't have to trust them at all.
Using remote storage with open-source local scrambling clients that many cryptologists have studied automates that process for the masses.
The security isn't a sticky problem. Publishing even minimally responsible journalism seems to be the sticky part.
--
make install -not war
The ftp protocol is not encrypted. Your account name and password is transmitted in the clear over the network.
Pleas, by all means, use scp instead of ftp. The scp protocol is covered (encrypted). It is part of the ssh suite of applications. Every Linux system comes with it. There is a suite of tools for Windows called Putty. They also include scp.
Truly
Cleara
Cleara
Well, let's see what they commit to contractually:
So, even though some of these outfits make advertising claims like "IT NEVER FORGETS ElephantDrive uses military-grade encryption and large scale disaster recovery techniques so your data is stored safely for as long as you keep your account.", they don't stand behind those claims. It would thus be inappropriate to trust any of them with important data.
Mozy encrypts all data locally using a 448-bit Blowfish cipher before uploading. You can chose your own private key when installing the software- even the free accounts.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
You say it's too expensive and then you say you're concerned about these services going out of business.
Well, you can't have it both ways. A cheap backup service is much more likely to go out of business.
Backup is one service where you don't want to go to the lowest bidder.
If your data is important enough, you'll pay a professional service a professional rate, to back it up. A backup service should be much more than some guy selling off pieces of his own USB drive attached to the Internet.
I personally use Strongspace. Its a secure file storage solution which is accessible with a web interface or sftp and even rsync. Since the storage is built upon ZFS, it allows for some nifty tricks as multiple backups and even revisions. And did I mention that they use GiB? I mean, that has to be turn on for you folks. Here is a list of plans on offer, how you can put it to good use and some FAQs. Check it out!
For encrypting single files, gpg is probably the simplest solution. Note that you don't have to bother with key-rings, digital signatures, etc. Just use conventional encryption and a GOOD (can't emphasize this enough) password.
A more user-friendly approach would be to use an encrypting file system, such as TrueCrypt, which presents a single file as a drive on your machine, and backup the encrypted file regularly.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
Never mind, I am an idiot... (memo to self: do research before submitting comment...)
The old Myspace.com closed it's doors back in 2001. The new MySpace beast is unrelated to that old site. (Google link doesn't require soul-sucking registration...)
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
"A cheap backup service..."
An expensive backup service might be expensive because it's buying shiny crap at exorbitant rates. Which makes it even more likely to fail than the cheap one. The price tells you nothing about either what equipment they're using, the failure rates of said equipment, their redundancy level, or their solvency.
"Backup is one service where you don't want to go to the lowest bidder."
Yep, that's one of those typical backup salesman lines to watch out for.
Backup is, in the end, about this: redundancy, redundancy and redundancy.
For backup purposes, you'd be better off buying cheap pieces of USB drives off two different guys in their basement than a single expensive service.
You _do_ want to go for the lowest bidder. Several of them, in fact. Redundant array of inexpensive backup solutions, as it were.
I'm amazed nobody's mentioned rsync.net so far, particularly on Slashdot. Cheap storage, access via rsync, instructions for mounting it remotely on Linux/FreeBSD (as well as Windows), plus they've given some thought to both the legal and privacy aspects: "rsync.net does not merely recommend that users encrypt their data, but provides resources, tutorials and unlimited technical support for such usage".
Everyone has interesting data. Most of my e-mails could be considered "boring", but they're interesting enough for Google to search through them to generate ad keywords so they can show ads at me.
An MP3 collection leads to "buy this type of music!" ads. Photo albums (with tags) lead to "Go to this place!" ads. There's a lot that can be found out from your files, even if you think they're uninteresting.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
...that'll let my group of friends create our own back-up service? I could easily gather up half a dozen ADSL 24/7 users who would be willing to donate 5GB of space for 1GB 5xMirrored. It'd be a gentlemen's agreement, not a SLA and they could of course block/delete it at any time, but then you've made a poor choice of friends. With a swarm download (getting a few blocks from each friend) speeds should be good even with the low upload. Back-up services are a bit too much like insurance companies - they compete really hard to give you the lowest price - but then they're also a bitch to get money out of. I'd much rather have a bunch of friends I could call up and say "hey, I just had a disk crash so I hope you don't mind that I leech 24/7 for a little while."
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As others have point out, they're missing a number of free alternatives.
The one I use is RoamDrive. It's free, it no longer has ads (it used to have a banner at the bottom), and it works with Gmail or Hotmail.
They've been promising a pro version that lets you link an unlimited number of gmail and hotmail accounts for a virtually unlimited amount of free storage, but it's been over a year and nothing has been released yet.
Still, the free version works really well. No limitations on file names or types, it automatically compresses files when necessary, and the only limitation for how much you can store is how much free space you have on the e-mail account in question.
Pros
Cons
Carbonite does a slow-trickle upload of my chosen files and directories when the computer isn't in use. I've uploaded over 50GB in about 4 weeks. I still keep local backups of everything, but it's great to have an offsite option for so cheap.
I am not surprised that the article did not have rsync.net in the comparison, since their candidates were pretty consumer-grade.
But rsync.net is going to become known as _the_ choice for unix/sysadmin folks (and the generally clueful).
They are the only ones that offer advanced backup and encryption services such as duplicity and rdiff-backup support, in addition to their basic protocols such as rsync, Unison, WebDAV.
Also, and this is huge, they are the ONLY offsite backup provider with geographical redundancy. I have my data backed up automatically to both San Diego and Denver, and this is being expanded this summer to Switzerland, India, and Japan.
rsync.net is going to be the "kleenex" of offsite storage, at least for sysadmin/Unix people.