7 of the Best Free Linux Online Backup Solutions

If you do not value the information stored on your computer, data loss may not represent a significant issue. However, for the majority of users, the loss of their data is likely to have profound implications, such as financial loss, time and effort, and emotional distress. Typically, users who are casual about data protection have not yet experienced data loss. However, it represents the most important thing on your computer.

Reinstalling an operating system is pretty quick and painless these days, and it is not a huge inconvenience to have to reconfigure the computer to your own personal preferences. However, your data is the product of your thought and effort. It may represent years of hard labour! Without a backup of your data, you will have to work from scratch. Worse still, some data is irreplaceable.

There are many different ways of backing up data, each with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. With ever faster internet speeds, the online backup method has become an increasingly attractive option, enabling users to save files so they are safe and secure, and then access them from anywhere in the world. Online backup services provide users with storage space that can be accessed over the internet. Some internet providers provide free online storage as an extra service. For example, Virgin Media's fibre optic service offers between 5GB and unlimited storage and backup for their customers with upload speeds of up to 5Mb a sec. However, fibre optic is not widespread, and broadband upload speeds are slower (typically up to 1.3 or 2.5Mb a sec), which is worth bearing in mind if you have a lot of data to backup.

Many people are concerned about the security of their data. They disregard online services and back up their computer to an external hard disk or network drive. However, unless these drives are stored remotely, users are not protected from fire or theft.

There are many service providers that offer a Linux compatible online backup system. All of the online solutions featured in this article offer users some free online space (varying between 1GB and 50GB), with the exception of CrashPlan. Typical features that they provide include encryption, online access to files, data compression, bandwidth usage, continuous backup, file-by-file-restore, multiple versioning, redundancy, although some are only available for paid accounts.

To provide an insight into the quality of remote backup services, we have compiled a list of 7 online backup solutions. We have ranked them in our order of preference, with Dropbox carrying our highest recommendation. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to keep their data safe.

Now, let's explore the 7 online backup solutions at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

Other articles of interest for backing up data:

Bare-metal restore is a technique in the field of data recovery and restoration where the backed up data is available in a form which allows one to restore a computer system from "bare metal". The online backup solutions featured in this article do not provide this type of functionality, and we would instead suggest you review our Disk Cloning feature instead.

For the best Linux software to back up to hard disks, NAS drives, tape drives, and optical discs, we would also recommend you visit our 21 of the Best Free Linux Backup Software.

Return to our complete collection of Group Tests, identifying the finest Linux software.

Last Updated Sunday, July 03 2011 @ 09:44 AM EDT