Online File Storage

Online (cloud) file storage is gaining popularity with individuals and small businesses. These services are relatively inexpensive, or free in some cases for smaller storage needs. Large companies will often build out their own data centers, or use some of the major hosting providers that run data facilities around the country. For the rest of us there’s really no need to purchase and manage file servers if all we need is a remote option for storage, backup and file sharing.

Two caveats about online file storage:

  • Redundancy — Do not store the only copy of your data with an online service. Even the most reputable firm can make mistakes or have system failures of their own. Important data should reside in at least two places, kept in sync on a regular basis, and tested regularly to ensure that you have a good copy to restore from. Prepare for the day that one of your file storage options — local or remote — will fail.
  • Sensitive Data — Consider carefully what kind of information you are storing online, such as sensitive customer data (names, addresses, SSNs, account numbers), financial info, logins and passwords, etc. Anything that could expose you to legal action or otherwise seriously impact your business if it were stolen, have a separate backup location for this — a portable hard drive that you take home with you, a spare computer secured in your office, even a little flash drive that you lock in a drawer somewhere.

One of the better features of online storage is the ability to share large files with others. Email technology was originally developed to be no more than a means of sending a few lines of text, but we have come to rely on it to deliver large photos and videos as well, and sometimes it doesn’t handle these file transfers very well. Also, some companies will limit the size of email attachments that go through their corporate mail servers, so really large files may not even be allowed as attachments. This is where a shared online storage service can fill the gap.

I mentioned Dropbox in another post — it’s the only one I have used so far, and it’s very good but there are others that seem to be well-established so I thought I would cover a few of those here as well.

Box.net

Box.net (www.box.net) has several pricing tiers starting with a free service for up to 1 GB in storage space. They offer custom branding, file search, and accelerated upload speeds for premium accounts. Box.net is designed heavily around collaboration so this might be a good one to consider for work teams, but it does not offer client software to integrate with your Mac or PC file system like Dropbox does. This may not matter much though, and it looks like a good choice for small to medium size businesses. They have a pretty impressive list of customers so they must be doing something right.

SugarSync

SugarSync (www.sugarsync.com) offers a 2 GB account for free, and there are four more levels of pricing and storage from there. They have client installations for Mac and PC as well as mobile access options for iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices. It looks to be similar to Dropbox as a storage and synchronization service.

Mozy

Mozy (www.mozy.com) works a little differently from the others. They also have a 2 GB free option, and the next level is MozyPro for more advanced needs. MozyPro performs a block-level backup routine, which means it only updates the portion of a file that has changed rather than running a new backup of the entire file. This helps to speed things up since there is less data to copy on these incremental backups.

They claim it also works on Microsoft Outlook PST email files as well, which is a major plus for Outlook users since PST files contain the entire personal folder structure, including attachments, and this database can become huge. I know some email pack rats who keep every email and attachment they’ve received for the last several years, and their PST files can exceed 15 GB in some cases. An incremental backup of these large archives is a great asset, assuming it works as advertised — if you get a Mozy account and backup your PST files, you should run a few backups and then test an email restore from the backup. PST files are known to become corrupted and will be worthless to you if they don’t restore successfully.

That said, Mozy’s service appears to be a stronger technical offering than the basic backup and sync products, and geared to more mission-critical business needs. Desktop and server platforms are supported so you can also run your file and application server backups through here. Desktop licensing is $4 plus 50¢ per GB monthly, and server licensing is $7 plus 50¢ per GB monthly. Restoration can be done via the Mozy client, over the web or from a DVD.

ElephantDrive

ElephantDrive (www.elephantdrive.com) has a Home/Home Plus Edition and Pro/Pro Plus Edition, both of which work from a client installation on your computer. The Home Editions start at $5 per month and the Pro Editions start at $35 per month up to $100 per month for Pro Plus, which provides 2 Terabytes (2,000 GB) of storage. Files are encrypted with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) using a 256-bit key.

Posted: June 13th, 2010
Filed under: Free (or low-cost), Security & Privacy, Web-based, Windows Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments »

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