Backup A Second … What Cloud Service Deserves Your Data?

Number Of Actual Backups = Number Of Backups -1

There are a lot of cloud based providers for backup and archiving, just check your email and you probably have at least on provider sending you offers right now.  The question is which one to chose, and that is not just a matter of price but also their reliability.  It also matters how easy it is to get your data up there and the interface to download it again if needed.

Ars Technica investigated some of the top vendors, including Carbonite, Arq, iDrive, Spideroak One, and Backblaze to see what they offer for you.  Their test involved 1,024 1MB files and a single 1GB file, all made of completely incompressible data, plus one tiny text file.  On a fresh VM they installed the various clients for upload and download, not to mention the interface.  By changing the name of that text file, they were able to investigate the reliability of the continuous backup service as well as versioning features.

They did come out with a clear winner, which was not the fastest of the bunch but offered significantly more features and a decent price.  Find out who got the prize and why in their full review.