When it comes to online backup of your data, there’s probably more options than in any other web 2.0 space. However, recently I’ve tried some of these services out and found out that many have become unnecessarily complex, some are ad hells, and some don’t work at all. I’ve gone through this mess and chosen 5 simple online backup services that just work.
DropBoks is the king of simplicity. Open the page and you’ll immediately know what to do, as the whole service consists of an upload form and a file listing. Your account has 1 GB of storage space, and individual files can be max. 50 MB in size. Another nice thing about DropBoks is that it’s not only free, it also has no ads whatsoever - it’s fully donation-supported.
I’ve always liked it when a service gives me a subdomain to use: it’s somehow easier to remember. Ewedrive gives you just that, and doesn’t create a lot of fuss about the service. After registering, you’re allocated 1 GB of free space which you can use as you please - publicly or privately, the choice is yours. Among other features, Ewedrive supports encryption, it has no file size limits, and doesn’t restrict upload/download in any way. Ewedrive also has an interesting way of increasing capacity: if you need more space, you can buy credits, which you exchange for more space at a rate of 5 pennies (UK currency) per gigabyte.
*disclaimer: a couple of days after this article was published, Ewedrive became a FranticIndustries sponsor.
Need to dump a file online quickly? No worries: open OneDump and you’ll immediately be greeted with an upload form. You can register for an account, but it’s not necessary; simply upload your stuff and you’ll get a link from which you can retrieve it later. There are no space restrictions, but you can only upload 10 files at once and each file must not exceed 5 MB.
DropSend is primarily a service for sending big files to people, but you can also use it to store your data online. The basic plan is free, and it includes 250 MB of storage; by cashing out $99 for the best plan you can go up to 250 GB and some enterprise-style features, for example 100 users and the ability to brand and customize the visual identity of the service to your liking.
No registration needed, no charge, no need to install anything. Just open it up and upload files as big as 100 MBs, without download restrictions. Besides the possibility to automatically send the link via e-mail to a couple of friends, options are non-existent, but when you need to upload something quickly, JustUpIt will do just fine.
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great post, will be bookmarking it
also i remember box.net as the original king of this area, any reason they were left off?
@jamie: I aimed for simple tools. I opened box.net and I saw too much going on there. BTW, this was not meant to be a comprehensive roundup - there’s over 200 of online backup tools. I just chose some that are simple, that I’ve tried before, that don’t have too many ads, and that work well.
Another great review–Thanks. Another great, virtually-ad-free tool I’ve found is YouSendIt. For those of us out there using Online Storage platforms to share files (even with ourselves across different locations) YouSendIt allows you to send large files (up to 100 MB for free accounts). So far, I’ve liked the service a lot - great for music and video sharing and it practically replaces FTP if that’s your persuasion. You can read more about at http://steffanantonas.com/2007/07/13/been-using-a-free-online-storage-platform-to-share-large-files-yousendit-is-a-great-free-alternative/
What about www.mozy.com? This is one of the really good ones.
i use bingo disk.
I use http://www.FreeDrive.com You get 5 gigs free! Works great!
S3 jungledisk or S3fox anyone? I’ve got many gigs on my S3 account and costs me just a few dollars per month. Here’s why I think S3 just dominates.. http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/10/07/why-i-started-using-amazon-s3/
I’ve tried S3 but it’s kind of a pain in the butt. I like www.mediafire.com the most. It’s got some pretty fancy and very google-esq management tools, super easy to use and very nicely designed. They offer unlimited storage.
I’ve found that rsync.net is a pretty great, inexpensive, and reliable service.
another fine one: http://www.fast.ge
UpDump.com used to be really good, theres so many upload sites to add to this list that do the same funtionality, anyways good read, thanks.
Jungledisk rocks! A Windows Explorer interface into S3. The program is free, the storage is cheap.
Nice article. I use Pandafile (www.pandafile.com) usually.. it’s pretty much a 1-step upload process with no registration. Very simple, which is why i like it.
hmm..how about megaupload?
Waht about BackupRight Pro?
Great website that I use constantly, www.omnidrive.com
how do you not incude http://www.box.net/ ?
There’s also the free 5gig account that was bought by AOL!
Perhaps you should give www.fileden.com a mention? A few ads here and there, but overall, great service.
Is there anything with direct linking/hot linking. Most are very limited, you can try rapidshare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/42464928/getfile.php_lg_en_xid_tbctbgli (premium account list)?
try fileflyer.com
i use pando to transfer attachments untransferable because of email attachment limits. that works.
just remember and password zip your files, who knows what these people will do with your info.
why didn’t anyone mention WWW.TRANSFERBIGFILES.COM
it doesn’t get any simpler and more efficient than that
I’ve never used any online file storage before. Do any of these (or other) services allow for scheduled uploading (and maybe even downloading) of specified files? I’d love to be able to use one of these sites to sync between home and office.
box.net deserves a honor here
strongspace.com
just wondering what the “free” storage sites are doing with your files????
Some of these are great services, but I believe the best (by far) is Divshare.com. They offer unlimited storage that never expires and uploads of 200MB at a time.
They have an optional drag & drop interface, automatic photo galleries, playable MP3 and Video uploads (with a flash player), among several other niceties.
I’ve been using the service for about 6 months now with great success.
Oops - that didn’t create a link. Here: DIVSHARE.COM.
I use www.mozy.com
i personally find xdrive.com which is affiliated with aol to be the best. it gives you 5 gigs free and ive seen transfer speeds upwards of 1mbps
Great, another worthless post that made it to #1 on del.icio.us, I wish people would quit writing this garbage. You could have just as easily picked 5 other services, all of which are quite similar. You commentary added zero insight into the strengths of any particular service, you might as well have just posted links to their five respective homepages.
Only one person (zebrum) has mentioned so far about encryption; any service you use should have a clearly defined terms of service and privacy policy; many of the sites listed in these comments (FreeDrive, e.g.) don’t.
Personally I second rsync.net — not only do they have very clear privacy policies, they *encourage* you (and fully support) to encrypt all your data before it goes on their servers, using free software like Duplicity/GnuPG.
Even though it’s only your resume, PDFs of past tax returns and other information that really only matters to you remember that The Man can come knocking with a warrant for any reason at any time. Defend your right to privacy by using it! Privacy is not a crime.
www.divshare.com is by far the best I’ve used
I use Mozy and so far have 9GB for free. It’s purely a backup service and is not designed for sharing files.
The backup client runs in the background and unobtrusively starts a backup when you are away from your computer. There’s even a Mac version.
I started off with 2 GB of space. Unlimited storage is 5 bucks a month. Or for every referral you get an extra 256MB and the person who used your link gets an extra 256MB. I simply put my referral link on my personal homepage: http://smegal.gotdns.org/ and before I knew it a dozen people had signed up and I had 9GB of storage.
So try it out. It finally got me to backup!
https://mozy.com/?code=RVB4DD
@giorgi
re:fast.ge is there a way to get an English-language interface?
Great information, promptly dugg and delicious’d.
Handy information! and for web search I use http://www.intelways.com
There is one which is awful in many ways: Streamload a.ka MediaMax. You upload to the supposedly free service. Then your images or whatever you uploaded start disappearing (or better yet “your file is processing, please wait” You can wait for hours and they won’t appear). I haven’t figured out the rationale of this but I think they want you to subscribe to access your files. Stay away from this.
I second Liber, Streamload is the worst O/L storage service available.
I’m a writer and needed what I’d hoped was safe and secure storage where I could store and organize notes, graphics, photos, etc. Everything was okay for about six months but now I cannot access or retrieve my stored items. For the past few months they’ve posted some lame excuse [IOW, they can’t pay their bills and/or may go out of business] on their blog and recently they’ve even disabled the feedback link.
When writing directly to Steamload, after several days pass they might respond with basically the same crap they’ve posted on their MediaMax blog.
The fact is that’s there’s no call for this. If you’re having problems, let me know about it and then make my files available so I can retrieve whatever I need. When you’re up front with me I’m much more likely to re-use your product or service once you have things repaired and operational than when you keep me in the dark and then basically screw me.
My advise! Tell everyone you know that they should avoid MediaMax like the plague.
Thanks for reading this.
what about the prying eyes of the service owners? i’d bet anything that techies at all of these online storage companies are checking out your files. not that it is any harm but they prob do it anyways. and what about when they get bought or go broke and then the isp or whoever buys assets takes over? your files are now in strangers hands. if US bureacracies, major corps can lose mega data, then so can these 100’s of small fly by night storage companies. would anyone bring their valuables to a stranger’s house, leave them, wiht the tacit assurance of security?
@Liber
Thanks for that. I use mediamax and found it to be OK in general. But if things keep disapearing, then maybe I should not rely on it. Perhaps the BOFH is allocating more free disk space for users
mozy.com is a great service. The app runs in the background and updates whatever files you tell it to every few hours. Simple, cheap and easy. 2BG for free, but you can more if needed.
Very interesting post. I am using mozy.com - can imagine why it’s not on that list as it requires download and some steps to use it. Still it’s fast and powerful. And cheap (USD 5/month for unlimited storage).
Another question: my client requires to exchange large CAD files across continents. What is the best tool for that? Is there a tool that can recognise incremental changes within a file?
check out in.solit.us
unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, for free.
Thank you
thanks!
you forgot to include orbitfiles.com. it is a wonderful online back up system although it has file size upload limits. it is free and it is very user friendly. i’ve been using it for quite sometime now.
i am bookmarking this page nonetheless for future reference.
What about Boxstr? No registration needed, 5 GB of storage space, no ads, etc. Great post anyway!!
Thumbs up for both http://mozy.com and http://box.net
I use http://www.livesync.com 2GB free storage. It also provides a webmail and many functionalities.
Thankx,
its really good to know about these wonderful sites.
cheers.
I will certainly try these websites.
thank you for this list.
While I know it’s already been said, I like Box.net. I find it simple, and while file-size restrictions are annoying, I like the fact that it can give me HTML so that I can embed files onto other websites. Like, I recorded a song, and to send it out, I put it up on my MySpace page with the simple cut/paste style html they give you, which I modifyed a bit (now, you click a picture of a guitar)
So maybe it’s the easy public sharing that I like about Box that keeps me using it.
A couple of people here have already mentioned that a strong consideration in selecting any provider is the ability to encrypt your files and one or two others have also reaffirmed what I have always maintained that YOU not the service provider or their software should be in control of the encrtyption.
That’s one of things that’s attracted me to try out one of the 5 listed here - ewedrive.
They actually encourage you (well they do if you spend some time reading their website) to encrypt your stuff yourself and 7zip works best for me here.
I do thing Stan has however got a bit mixed up here in comparing what are essentially online file storage services with the likes of ewedrive which is more an online backup provider (oh yes there are differences).
I think it would have been better certainly (as others have also mentioned) to compare ewedrive with Mozy, Box, Carbonite et al.
Just my 2p’s worth.
Interesting reviews.
What’s the benefit of having online storage verses external hard-drives with in excess of 250Gb capacity?
Tom
In answer to you Tom, basically online backups give you a measure of off-site redundancy you wouldn’t get from a localised backup and also the fact you’re able to access that data from anywhere (in most cases where the provider gives you that option).
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned http://fileho.com/
According to the site:
“FileHo.com is an online one click file-hosting service. It allows users to upload, host and share files for free. We offer unlimited speeds, unlimited file-size, unlimited lifetime of files and unlimited disk space for any of your needs. Also, FileHo.com is an ad-free site! That’s why downloading process has never been so easy and fast.”
Sounds like the ultimate to me!
BTW, I agree with one poster that this post was a bit weak. Most of the sites mentioned had ridiculously low per file limitations (~100 GB or less) or lack of easy sharing (like not being offered, or requiring recipient to register for an account). These are pretty useless to most, I think. And also, such sites are a dime a (thousand) dozen.
However this post, it did generate useful posts from others suggesting some pretty nice sites.
Also, http://www.gigasize.com/ is a worthwhile mention. Unlimitted files, file size up to 1.5 GB, good for 90 days for the free account! I have actually used this one too, and it is pretty great. Only downside is it’s a bit of an ad mess for the downloader and the download speed was a bit slow. But they have to pay the bills somehow.
JustUpIt also sounds as [You Stupid]
where’s speedy share?
I have tried almost all listed here and I feel these are really good:
(1) Omnidrive (you have firefox extension, Fireuploader)
(2) Box.net (you have firefox extension, Fireuploader)
(3) DriveHq.com (you have firefox extension, fireFTP)
(4) GMail (firefox extension, GSpace)
Also, inbox.com offers free storage. Xdrive works rarely.
Nice list. It seems everyone has a favorite. Mine is sendspace.com. They even have hot linking for Pro members and all the management tools I need. I even set up a DropBox on my site to receive files. Cool!
This is something that is very fun to learn about. Although, it has take me a lot of time to be familiar with.
@Alan you know fileho! on the download page there are links to bad sites. Or else thats the best you can get. And hey Check out humyo.com file2you.net nakido.com
Mediamax provides the worst service you can imagine.
Files disappear, uploads don’t show or after days
Credit cards withdrawals are made too soon
Support hardly answers any calls and if they do they cannot say when it will be solved, this is happening for a year now and the company is in severe troubles now
You can read more at
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/26/streamload-upgrade-goes-very-wrong-some-users-revolt/
This is my first post
just saying HI
Which service would be best for say files for games that I want to keep and also family photos and quick videos of our kid playing to send to the grandparents?
Try Aruna Send for sending large files and file storage is in public beta. All free. Also, widgets and gadgets to make our life easier.
http://arunasend.com
I’d be wary of mozy as an online backup provider - they have a couple of ‘features’ that can really screw up you backups.
For a start, they don’t keep multiple versions of your files. How many times have you clicked ‘Save’ instead of ‘Save As’ and overwritten your original? Got mozy? You’re still screwed
They only keep the most recent version so your original is deleted on their server too.
They also delete files after 30 days, so if you don’t notice straight away that something has been deleted then you’ve lost it for ever.
Here’s a good article from cnet explaining the drawbacks of using a free service like mozy:
http://www.cnet.com/defensive-computing/8301-13554_1-9752330-33.html
Personally I use http://www.AngelBackup.com as they keep multiple versions and won’t delete anything unless you specifically tell them to!
Hello webmaster, This is just what I was looking for!
There are a lot of online storage service websites, some of them offer free storage. But generally speaking, most of the services are not so good. I have followed the industry for a long time and have personally tried many different services. Please read my reviews about the best online storage / backup services:
http://backupreview.googlepages.com/default.html
http://ftpreview.googlepages.com/index.html
Yeah, send all your personal information out into space. We’ll take care of it, honest. It’s FREE!
Are you people out of your forking minds?? You have gigantic harddrives, dirt-cheap removable media of all kinds, and you’re so swept up into this Webjax2.0 crap that you can’t figure out:
1. Big Business IS the government.
2. The government IS Big Business.
3. They will ALWAYS attempt to know as much about you as they can.
4. They will NOT use it in ways that are in YOUR best interests.
elviortrrol
I’ve found a great tool for remote backup: http://www.remotedatabackup.net
I was just looking Internet for on line backup tool and found
5 simple ways to store your data on line. This is very useful
to access my data anywhere from the world.
Note: some of the given link at here did not work. Just take a look at those.