Crash Plan

CrashPlan offers lots of backup features and the price is great - it starts free.

With the free plan you can backup to an external drive, netowkr drive, or even another computer over the internet (like a friends computer).

For $3.50/month you can backup unlimited data from a single computer to the crashplan servers and for $5/month you can backup unlimited data from multiple computers to the crashplan servers.

Their software works on windows, linux, and mac.

I am currently using the free plan. I bought a cheap intel atom machine for under $200. It's ultra quiet and low power and I run CentOs on it and it's sitting at home on my verizon fios line. All my office machines then backup to it over the internet. It's a great way to do offset backup extremely cheap.

Magic Briefcase

What is the Magic Briefcase?

It is a folder that is automatically created under your mydocuments that is pre-configured to full sync between multiple computers. You can set up any of your folders to work just like the Magic Briefcase.

How to use it?

1. Install SugarSync on multiple computers.

2. add a file to the Magic Briefcase.

3. It will appear in the same folder on computers and stay in sync.

carbonite

We have been attempting to connect to carbonite.com to bring you a review of their online backup service for the past 3 days, however something is not working. It seems the connection is broken somewhere between our offices and carbonite as the page simply does not load. We'll keep trying and post back here with the results.

SugarSync

Mozy Online Backup - 2GB Free Online Backup

Mozy offers 2GB of online backup for free. You don't even need to provide a credit card to take advantage of this offer.

The mozy moto is Simple, Automatic, and Secure.

Here are the details:
Simple - Mozy offers business-level features at consumer-friendly prices.
Automatic - With Mozy's "set-it-and-forget-it" design, you'll have more time to spend on other important matters. Mozy provides the free client for your pc to take care of all your automatic backup needs.
Secure - Enjoy peace of mind in knowing that your data is encrypted and stored in a safe, remote location.

If you need more than 2GB of online backup space you can upgrade to their unlimited plan for $5.95/month.

Mozy also has business and enterprise backup plans starting at just $3.95/month/pc

With any online backup service you should always test the recovery features before you commit to the service. Online backup is worthless if there is not a good way to recover your data. The Mozy online backup utilities make recovery a snap.







Screen Shots:
Remote Backup Status -






Remote Backup Configuration




Remote Backup Options

Online backup with Rsync

rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer. rsync is freely available under the GNU General Public License.

Some information on how to use Rsync to perform your online backup:

First, if you are on windows you'll need to install cygwin.
Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts:
A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.

How to use rsync and cygwin to sync files from a linux server to a windows pc by True Blade Systems