Back It Up, Baby. Online, That Is

A long time ago, in a town far, far away -- a ten minute drive from the TopTenREVIEWS offices anyway -- I embarked on my "tech career" by taking tech support calls for Iomega. Most of you are familiar with their Zip Drive, which debuted in the mid 90's with affordable 100MB disks. Day in and day out for a few months I listened to horror story after horror story about how customers lost all their business or personal data.

It's an unfortunate fact of tech life that our precious and expensive hardware can still fail us, and my experience reminded me of when parents and school guidance counselors advised to "never put all your eggs in one basket." Even with one backup drive, disk, DVD or Blu-ray disc, you still run a high risk of losing everything. I know it sounds alarmist to say such things, but I saw repeated cases where business owners or ferventscrapbookers put ALL their data on one backup disk, and for reasons ranging from natural disasters to kids spilling drinks to simple hardware failure lost everything. Some even went so far as to archive, or move, everything from their hard drive to one disk. Not a good practice.

Conventional IT wisdom states that backups need to be across multiple drives/disks/tapes as well as offsite. You can go buy three of the most gigantic external hard drives for backup, but if you have a fire, flood or tornado, you could still lose your precious financial and personal files, hence the need foroffsite backups.

Offsite backups can be a pain, because you have to remember to take the disks/drives with you when you leave home or work. Also, the danger inherent to transporting standard hard drives is one drop could destroy your data. This is where online data backup services come in.

Let the professionals handle it. With your data on their backup servers with backup power supplies and redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAIDs), the chances of them losing your data due to catastrophe, hardware failure or human error are slim.

Our all software and services guru Taylor "T-Bone" Thomas just completed a review of the ten best online data backup services, and I've listed the top three below. I myself have used Dropbox and love their service and ease of use.

Best Online Data Backup Services

SugarSync - TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner

Dropbox - TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winner

iBackup - TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award winner