Use of online storage

For years, people have been wanting a more widely accessible storage medium than carrying around bundles of CDs or tape backups. The explosion of cheaper flash memory and the proliferation of USB thumb drives has helped people carry their data wherever they want to go. But what if you run into the problem of sitting down at a computer that lacks USB ports — or uses an older operating system that doesn’t recognize plug-n-play drivers — or has them locked down through computer policy? At this point you’re pretty stuck and your data isn’t very helpful to you at all. I, like many people, have been using online storage for quite some time. Since storage is so cheap these days, consumers are using their ever expanding email accounts as personal storage for smaller files such as pictures or documents and why not, it’s safer on some remote server than in your pocket. What’s the chance of the drive your data is on getting put in the clothes washer for a good run through the rinse cycle? Not very likely and even if it did, they’ve got backups.

These days there are a number of players in the online storage arena, some free some not. If the company is established and respected, price is of little concern since ads can make up for lost revenue of free storage and bigger space allotments are the luxury of paid accounts. A recent entrant to the online storage game is iBackup. I say “recent” because time, as measured on the Internet, travels much faster than it does in the real world. IBackup offers for-pay online storage and offers both browser-based and application-based solutions. With a variety of plans ranging from just $10 a month to $6000 a month, they’ve got a pretty wide gamut covered. One point about the pricing, I’d never go for the economy plans as they lack any snapshot support. What if you’ve just uploaded a recently edited text document only to find out a small, but important, portion is missing. Well, without a snapshot to rollback to, you’ve just lost that data!

Uploading to your account through a web browser is secured by 128-bit SSL encryption, sure to keep those wily hackers out of your data. The local application also transmits all your bits and bytes through 128-bit SSL regardless if you’re on a Mac or a PC however, us Linux users are left in the cold. For those who want an extra layer of security, IBackup Professional actually encrypts the data with 256-bit AES encryption before sending it through SSL. Even in case of a man-in-the-middle SSL attack, your data is still secure. All of the local applications function just like any other mounted drive in your computer, making transfers to your online storage no different than moving data in your file manager. This is definitely a leg up on the competition, especially with other recently hyped sites offering “always available” data.

I’d love nothing more than an account but since I solely use Linux for anything not related to work, I’m stuck using the browser application but hopefully this will change in the future since I’m sure IBackup’s SANs are running Linux at the core. For $15 a month, you get 5GB of storage with snapshots, what’s not to love?

This was a sponsored post.