Have you backed up your pc recently? Where are all those precious photos, documents, and programs backed up at? Most of us do what we call an offline backup (and if you are not doing any type of backup, all I have to say is keep your fingers crossed). An offline backup is a a backup that’s on another hard drive, cd, or dvd. This is a great way to backup, but it takes time especially if you have a laptop. Also if your backup set, and the original files are at or in the same location it’s not a good idea, especially if it’s caught in a fire. To solve both these problems, do an online backup. There are a few online backup tools to make your life a bit easier, and they backup anytime as long as you are online during the backup process. My favorite is idrive. I know of two more great backup utilities that people loved they are mozy, and carbonite. Mozy didn’t work for me very great. Everytime it took off to run the backup, and started to calculate the files that needed to be backed up it would stall. I tried three times on different occasions to get mozy to work on my laptop but it would never take. As far as carbonite is concerned, never tried it, but I’ve read from different forums that it lacks some features that mozy and idrive have, but it works. Not sure to this day why mozy didn’t work though, and their tech support wasn’t sure either.

So I decided to give idrive a shot, and to my amazement I loved it. It works perfectly, if there’s any problem to backup the data it sends me an email and lets me know. It also keeps the last 30 versions of any file it backups. Which proved very useful, when I needed a document recently. The problem was I saved the wrong version and the backup already took place. Luckily I logged into idrive web interface and was able to pick the correct version and download it. If you’re looking for a great online backup tool check out idrive. I’ve included a few features of idrive below, including a screenshot.

Idrive Features

1. Continous data protection – the minute you change a file it’s backed up immediately. You can turn this feature on or off, it’s your choice.

2. Web based – Forgot your file or presentation at home, if it got backed up, then log into the idrive web interface and download it no matter where you are.

3. Versioning – Keep the last 30 revisions of a file, so you can choose which one you want to restore.