5 Best Online Backup Services for Small Businesses - Page 2

Crashplan+

Crashplan+ is a moderately-priced service with both home and business plans. The business plans are reasonably priced; you can either pay $7.49 per-computer for unlimited storage, or pay for a specific amount of storage. Their online calculator will quickly show which option is the best deal. The company claims it's fully committed to the unlimited plans and will not take them away.

The Crashplan+ feature set includes backups to local servers or removable media, 30-day free trials and HIPAA compliance. The free version makes backups to your removable media or servers, and to any other servers under your control, but not to Crashplan's servers.

JungleDisk

Figure 2: The clean, simple Crashplan+ Web login. (Click for larger image).

JungleDisk offers zero-knowledge security similar to SpiderOak, and a unique pay-as-you-go pricing structure: you pay exactly for what you use, rather than purchasing fixed blocks of storage sizes.

The Server edition costs $5 per server per month plus $0.15 per GB. You have a choice of storing your data on Amazon's S3 cloud service, or on the Rackspace Cloud. Rackspace is a popular and reliable hosting service, and it owns JungleDisk.

You can choose from three JungleDisk editions: Personal, Workgroup and Server. Personal is designed for a single user using one or more devices. Workgroup support multiple users in a single storage account, with access controls and shared and private data. Server comes with server-friendly reporting and remote administration features.

Barracuda Backup Service

Barracuda Backup Service is a higher-priced service for shops that want more control, flexibility, and comprehensive central administration of multiple locations. It offers offsite network backups integrated with local backups.

Offsite backups can be hosted on Barracuda's cloud infrastructure or mirrored on your own sites, and you can mix and match local and remote storage. So you might want to store important files offsite and locally, and less-important files locally only, for example.

You get fine-grained control of scheduling, from real-time backups of important files to whatever interval you want for other files. Barracuda meets HIPAA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley security requirements.

You start by purchasing a Barracuda backup appliance, which is a dedicated backup server pre-loaded with backup and monitoring software. Pricing starts at $999 for the 100GB-capacity 190 model server (250GB raw capacity) and go all the way up to about $45,000 for the model 990, which has 24 TB raw capacity and about 12 TB backup capacity.

Then offsite storage costs $50 per month per 100GB, with no other costs; no agent, per-server, or client access licenses. You get 24x7 technical support, and continual monitoring of your server health. Visit the information pagefor links to an informative video and a live demo.

Carla Schroder is the author of The Book of Audacity, Linux Cookbook, Linux Networking Cookbook,and hundreds of Linux how-to articles. She's the former managing editor of Linux Planet and Linux Today.

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