Cloud backup vs local external backup !

Data is very invaluable. Its growing and changing every hour. Few years ago you could store all the data in your computer in a CD or perhaps in a DVD. But today, the amount of data we deal with is a lot more than that.  We store all kind of information on the computer from emails to bank statements, photos to home videos, music to movies and so forth.  Some dearly than others, imagine one fine morning you wake and find your trusted computer doesn’t boot up because the hard drive crashed , worse you find out they can’t recover the data and you as the vase majority doesn’t have a backup of the data. Lot of us store bank account number, password, financial investment details and so on and do not keep a hard copy, what if all that goes away one day and you can’t remember any of those information.  Its not pretty…right ?  Well, vast majority of us under estimate the importance of a backup until something bad happens.
For me it happened a few months ago; my macbook pro fell down from my hand while I was downloading a file. I picked it up just to find my hard drive crashed and was deemed to be unrepairable and unrecoverable.  When the guy at the Apple genius bar asked me whether install basic OS on my replacement hard drive, I told him not to worry about it and just give me a blank drive. Why ? Because I have set up time machine back set up at home.  Both my iMac and MacBook Pro is always backed up by time machine all the time by itself.  I appreciated by 1 TB external drive and Apple’s time machine a lot more from that day onwards.  What would have happened if I hadn’t had a backup. I would have lost lot of my photos, music, videos, client details, demo websites and so on.
Time Machine is strictly a Mac solution, Windows and Linux have other solution as well : Western Digital, Seagate and Genie-soft are some for Windows , Time Vault and Flyback are some for Linux. Or even better a mouth watering  Drobo

Ok, so you have a great local backup solution in the warmth of your home. But what happens if some unfortunate were to happen to your home. Lets say a fire, tornado, flood, hurricane hits your house, you get robbed or your five year old thought that black box like looking thing is a great to throw around !!  You now have lost all your data even though you thought you had the best backup solution for your data.

Cloud solution is the answer for the above issue. If you think your data is invaluable and you need to have a copy stored outside  your house, then you need to look into online backup solution or as its dearly called these days a cloud backup solution. There are numerous cloud backup solution providers out there and each of them have their own pros and cons . Some required manually backup while others had totally automated solution, some is paid by the amount of storage you used while others had a flat rate for unlimited storage.  For the purpose of this blog,  I decided I pick the  four cloud backup solution for personal users that had automated solution and compare them.
While, I am still working on the comparison, here is the vendor and their cost :

If you concerned about security, then Mozy is the best bet. But if you want flexibility and fast transfer rate I feel Backblaze to be a better option. Backblaze also gives you the option of getting the restore media on DVD and External drive. Although it will cost you dearly, it can come handy if you need to have your system restored quickly.  JungleDisk with Rackspace hosting brings the cloud technology and rackspace support at a reasonable cost.  What I like about CrashPlan+ is the multiple backup site feature and the multiple client feature.  With CrashPlan+ you can backup your computer(s) to multiple location, you can choose the backup destination to be another computer or external hard drive or to the crashplan data center or to all of them at the same time. They also let you backup multiple computers on the same plan.  Of the bunch I feel Carbonite to be the least attractive.  Each of them has their pros and cons.  My first choice would be backblaze, just because the backup seems to be fast and they have multiple options for restore method.