Sunday 18 October 2009

A Comparison of Carbonite vs. Mozy Home Online Backup

Author: Travis Van Slooten

Comparing Carbonite and Mozy Home is like a match between two giants. They are two of the leading backup services currently operating. In this electronic age where almost all our important data is in digital format it is important that it is kept save and secure. Increasingly, cyber attacks and computer failures are putting our data at risk. Regular backups are a necessity of life. That is what these two companies provide.

So why only compare Carbonite vs Mozy Home? The answer is easy. These are the two most popular and widely used online backup services for home users right now. They dominate this market because they both are easy to use and very inexpensive. The real question is, which one is best? Let's take a look at some of the most important areas to evaluate when it comes to online backup and see how these two providers compare.

Cost & Storage Capacity

The amount of data you can backup online and the cost of doing so are probably the two areas of concern that come to mind immediately for home users contemplating which backup provider to choose. Both Carbonite and Mozy Home offer unlimited backup. It doesn't matter if you have a few files to backup or several thousand, you won't have anything to worry about with either provider. Carbonite offers one, two, and three year subscriptions. The one year subscription costs $54.95. Mozy Home offers a month-to-month plan and one and two year subscriptions. Their month-to-month plan costs $4.95/month while their one year subscriptions are $54.45.

Easy to Use

Carbonite and Mozy both offer a user friendly backup that, once it is setup, can be counted on to just do its thing without any interaction from the user. They both deliver on this offer quite well. Sometimes we read about user complaints on how long the initial backups take but this is going to be typical of any backup system you use. The size of the data and the speed of your internet are determining factors in this first backup. Even if you use a local backup to another hard drive, it may still take over night to finish. This is just the reality of backing up literally everything on your hard drive.

Even if it might seem that in this area both providers ensure equal services, Carbonite is more appreciate than Mozy Home due to the fact users like the simple interface of Carbonite more. Mozy Home interface offers more advanced settings which might seem attractive and interesting for computer geeks, but overwhelming for home users.

Security and Backup Process

Both Carbonite and Mozy Home secure your files via encryption. The files are encrypted before they leave the computer, thus are safe as they travel across the internet. They are stored in encrypted format on their servers, ensuring that they will not be subject to unauthorized access. Also, both of these services have a user friendly backup that can be automated or scheduled based on the needs of the customer.

File Restoration

Carbonite uses a standard process for restoring files which is activated simply by using the restore function in the software's desktop interface. With Mozy Home, you can restore your files using one of three methods: desktop interface restore, web restore, and DVD restore. It is also important to note that with both Carbonite and Mozy Home, restoring a large set of data and files can take a while so if you have 30GB of data to restore, don't expect to have it back on your computer within a few hours. Instead, it can take a few days.

Customer Support

When considering this area, home users think that both providers should make some improvements. There have been many comments and complaints for Carbonite and Mozy Home stating that the customer support is not as efficient as it should be. There are delays when handling queries and the information supplied is sometimes not enough. Still, Carbonite is more appreciated because it offers many ways to get in contact with the customer support service: phone, e-mail support and live chat. But, Mozy Home also offers live chat and e-mail support.

Summary of Carbonite vs. Mozy Home

Judging from the above feature-for-feature match up, Carbonite and Mozy Home are virtually identical in price and features so it's difficult to declare an absolute winner. Neither one is perfect but you shouldn't expect that when you're getting unlimited online storage for less than $5/month. For every customer that swears by Carbonite, there is one that swears by Mozy Home. The match up is virtually dead even.

The best way to find your right provider is to try their services and evaluate which one suits you best. They both offer affordable, attractive and cheap offers that are easy to test. Plus, Carbonite offers a 15-day free trial while Mozy Home a monthly alternative costing only $4.95. Test their services and decide on your own which one is the best!

About the Author: Travis Van Slooten is an expert Ezine Articles author who writes on a broad range of topics including weight loss supplements and electronics. For more information on online backup solutions, visit http://www.bestonlinestorage.com.

Friday 28 August 2009

Data Backup

No matter, either you work in a small organization or a big corporate or even in your dwelling! Users who give importance to secure their hard disk data’s must have to concern about data backup. Keeping your data safe is really an essential process, because data loss will turn as a big headache. It is pretty well known that computers
easily turn vulnerable to virus defects, hard disk failure and other natural disturbances. Once when your system turns a prey to such troubles, data backup will grant you the stupendous support to retrieve the essential information. It is really advisable to act very smart before facing serious troubles. So, data backup is the prominent method of practice to retrieve and save the data’s in case of any hang-ups.

Basically data backup will mean various things for several users. Data backup could be taken either for directories, files, folders, server, LAN, or a particular dissection on your hard drive. At times, when your system turns vulnerable, it is really a tough task to get back the essential data’s. To land safe from the nightmare, data backup will be the best choice to overcome the troubles. Taking a data backup is merely simple! You can take your data backup in CD, USB memory stick, DVD, network drive and local drive. To give additional security, you can make use of the features of remote backup to stockpile the data’s written offsite.

Also, you can avail the accessibility of the remote data backup with the support of email or FTP. Generally, data backup is ultimately automated and it fundamentally functions similar to the usual backup software. Rather directing the backups into the tape drive, or to several different media computer, data backup will direct the backup safely via internet connectivity to other computer offsite. This process is completely automated and huge deal of business workouts that holds massive data storage has to be set with everyday data backup.

Also, with the greatest assistance of offsite data backup, you can avail the stupendous support to prevent any critical information on everyday basis. Data backup is an excellent method of practice that could be done at a reasonable price. Moreover, data backup can be practiced at several levels and standards to match the customer’s needs and requirements.

When considered finally, Data backup is a prominent practice that facilitates the computer users to retrieve essential data, when their system turns failure.

About the Author: http://www.backupexact.com specializes in online backup services and online storage services and off-site date storage.

Monday 13 July 2009

How Data and Information Gets Lost and How To Recovery It

Author: Jacob Luis

Your observation of hazard and the fact of hazard are generally two diverse things. For instance, the system glitches and computer viruses more likely to cause data loss, while viruses cause poor system performance and they are not very likely to cause data loss whereas system glitches result into data loss in most of the cases. Backing up data on a regular basis, either to local hard drive or online storage system, is the best bet. It surely helps you to effectively handle data loss situations. But if no proper or complete backup exists, data recovery software is required to retrieve missing, lost or inaccessible data.

Hard Drive and System Issues
This is quite interesting thing that you can easily blame your system for the data loss and not so quick to blame yourself. In fact human error is a bigger factor of data loss than you would like to admit. In order to prevent software and hardware issues, you should use power backup and surge protector to keep the power steady and clean. File system corruption, hard drive crash, read/write head failure, virus infection, operating system malfunction, hard drive formatting and accidental deletion are some major cause of data loss. In all such cases, Hard Drive Recovery comes for your rescue.

Panic is an Aspect of Data Loss
User mistake is the major cause of data loss. There are some common things that user do, which make data loss situations more critical. When you guess data loss has struck, follow the underwritten steps:
* Panic is a general reaction and even the experience administrators can do wrong things in panic. Working without thinking may prove very dangerous for your data. Stop stressing about data loss and do not do anything to the damaged hard drive and your computer. * If you are hearing strange noises from your hard drive like scrapping and clicking, do not use any Data Recovery software on the hard drive. It could cause further damage and permanent data loss.
When all the preventive measures fail and data loss occurs, you are required to find out the cause of data loss and go for recovery solutions. If the problem is logical, it can easily handled using recovery software. On the other hand, physical data loss requires special help from Hard Drive Recovery professionals and corrupted file you need to use file recovery software.

Stellar Information Systems Limited is the leading provider of superior recovery solutions to effectively handle most of the data loss situations. The recovery software are available for Windows, Mac OS, UNIX, Linux and Novell operating systems. Service is performed in Class 100 Clean Rooms using cutting edge technologies.

About the Author: Jacob Luis is a student of Mass Communication doing research on partition recovery. He is also a NTFS Data Recovery Specialist.

Wednesday 11 March 2009

Lost Data: Here are some ways you can use for Data Recovery

Author: Mullwani

Once someone loses data, they have various things they can opt to do:

Use backups: If you have been keeping a good backup system, then recovery would be easy using it. Since a copy of the original information is stored on the backups, it is possible to retrieve data from them. This all depends on how effective your backup has been e.g. employing automatic backup at regular intervals, say after every hour. This means that recreating data from the backup would be less tiresome. But what if the backups are totally outdated? They will become almost irrelevant. Therefore, although data in backups could be reliable, it wouldn't be the most efficient way for data recovery. Also, what if both the backup and original information get destroyed?

Recreate the data from scratch: Others may opt to recreate data from scratch. If the data was not much then this would be a good option. But what if you are dealing with a large organization that has a data bank? One may not opt for recreation because it would need a lot of time and money. It has been found out that the estimated cost of recreating your data from scratch is $6000 per megabyte.

Perform personal data recovery: Most people may opt to do this to cut down the costs. They will look for personal ways and means to try and recover the lost data. With high costs of living and the current economy melt down, people are looking for the cheapest means of recovering their data. The internet offers so many do-it-yourself free data recovery software. Indeed, it is possible to try and recover data on your own by use of data recovery software but it may not be the best. You may end up doing more damage. Although the instructions are given, one may fail to understand some concept of the recovery and this may lead to permanent loss of data.

Employ data recovery services: This is by far the most preferable way of trying to salvage ones data. Statistics give it to us that data recovery services work about 80%-90% of the time. They are quite reliable in retrieving lost data. Data recovery experts are trained on procedures of retrieving your information.

More information about ways of data recovery follow the link

About the Author:

http://www.datarecovery.co.ke/