Monday, April 20, 2009

The Best Online Backup - How to Choose ( By Harry J. Andersohn)

If you've never experienced this emotion, you're just going to have to trust me on this one -- waking up the morning after a big storm, turning on your computer and instead of being met with the familiar welcome "ding" from your desktop having nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, happen is not a great feeling.

Nor is packing up your computer and trudging down to the local Best Buy to have the Geek Squad look at it, and having them tell you that your motherboard and hard drive were fried by an electrical surge.

And finally, what's really not a great feeling? Realizing that the hard drive that the geek behind the Geek Squad counter just told you was destroyed contained basically every piece of work, every last song you downloaded, and every last picture you've taken for the past three years.

You're probably not as stupid as I am in the sense that you may already have some sort of backup solution for your computer. At the time this happened to me, I didn't have anything. So I basically had to reconstruct everything I had done over the past 2,000 days or so, and of course some of the things, like the pictures for example, were just lost forever.

Well I've gotten a bit wiser since then, and I never operate any kind of computer now without a reliable online backup service. I also have secondary hard drives where all my material is backed up here in my home as well, but nothing beats the online backup for safety and the ultimate in security.

Now the question is, of course, how do you choose the one that's the best? Which is the best online backup service?
We're going to get to the answer to that question in just a second. But first I just wanted to give you a little bit of background on how these things work so that you can see for yourself which one might be best for your situation.

First, in my opinion it's very, very, very (did I say VERY?) important that whatever online backup service you choose offers completely automatic, and hopefully continuous, backup. There is simply no way that you are going to be able to remember or want to do regular backups of your system.

The service that I think is best -- and again we'll get to that in a second -- downloads a tiny piece of software to your system and then backs up everything on your hard drive (or only the files you choose -- it's up to you). And it does it completely in the background so you never even know what's happening, and on a continuous and automatic basis.

The other thing I look for, of course, is price. You basically don't want to be paying more than about five bucks a month (or 60 bucks a year) for the service.

Now that may seem cheap for the peace of mind and security that you get, and I guess it is. But thanks to that competition that makes it so hard to choose which service you want to use, these guys have to compete against each other constantly. So they're always trying to one-up each other when it comes to price.

Now, in terms of which service is the best online backup service you can get, here's what you need to do...

Go to this Best Online Backup review page, where you'll find video reviews of the top services and links to free trials for everything so you can see how they work before you every commit to one or the other.

That will make it really easy to compare what you're getting side by side.

You might also be interested in this best online backup video over on YouTube.

Hope that helps, and good luck with your new online backup service!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Harry_J._Andersohn

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