Check for news of outages and the vendor’s own service blogs. Availability (hopefully 24/7) can also be important. Some of the larger ones even back up to different geographical locations. Reliability: Generally speaking, data centers are backed up to the hilt. If private encryption keys aren’t available, read the privacy policy, especially with the free services-there are significant differences. Sadly, using your own key often limits the types of services (e.g., no mobile backup) available. Do NOT lose it, as it is absolutely required to restore your data. Privacy: If you’re concerned about the privacy of your data, make sure you use a service that allows the use of a personal encryption key that you define. Some services keep multiple versions of files, some don’t.

What to look for in free backup products Online storage and backup servicesĬapacity: Obviously, you’ll need as much storage as you have data, plus a little, or possibly a lot, more if you want to track changes and save previous versions of files. We installed the software and backed up the same 2GB data set to check for any major issues or glitches in the client software. Online services: The performance of online backup services will vary according to their location and the network equipment between you and the data depository. We also test the USB boot drives created by the programs. We then mount the images and test their integrity via the program’s restore functions. This is largely to test reliability and hardware compatibility, but we time two: an approximately 115GB system image (two partitions), and a roughly 50GB image created from a set of smaller files and folders. How we test free backup software and servicesīackup software: We run each program through the various types of backups it’s capable of.

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