Store It on the Web

More Online Backup Services

Acpana Data Deposit Box

This is one of the priciest services I tested, although its penny-per-megabyte-per-month plan has no minimum charge: Store nothing, pay nothing, or store only a few megabytes and pay only a few pennies per month--a boon for anyone who backs up only relatively small amounts of data.

Though the service's desktop client software is reliable and easy to use, it lacks a "do backup now" option. Data Deposit Box does offer several nice bonus features such as the ability to share folders by e-mail, and a file-management interface that is exceptionally clean and practical.

ElephantDrive

Currently in beta, this site offers 500MB of free Web storage space. The pay plan is more expensive than that of the other free service I looked at, Mozy, but at $10 per month or $100 per year for up to 10GB of storage, ElephantDrive's per-gigabyte rate is half that of either IBackup or XDrive. If your system doesn't have a fast upstream broadband connection, however, it could take days to upload multigigabytes of data to this or any other online storage service.

Like the other services I tested, ElephantDrive supplies client software only for Windows. ElephantDrive says it will switch from Microsoft's .Net Framework to the open Java platform to add support for Mac and Linux users.

In my tests, transfers were stable and reliable, but the client dropped some connections. Still, any service whose marketing uses elephant puns bears watching.

Mozy

Mozy's client software for uploading and restoring files was in beta when I tested it, but the service performed well despite the lack of visual feedback while a backup restore is in progress (this should be fixed by launch time).

Mozy's for-pay service is cheap compared with the norm: $20 for up to 5GB, $30 for 10GB, and $40 for 20GB--per annum. You get only five free restore operations per month, but that should be more than enough for most users.

Jon L. Jacobi