Webware

Online-backup company Backblaze (Windows | Mac) announced on Tuesday that it has opened its service up to businesses. Backblaze will charge companies a flat fee of $50 per computer per year.

Backblaze's service mimics other, more popular services like Mozy (Windows | Mac) and Carbonite (Windows). Users need only to download its uploading software to their computers and create an account. Once complete, Backblaze starts backing up the contents of the user's computer to its data center.

Backblaze backs up all files on the computer, except for the operating system, temporary files, apps, or files over 4GB in size. Uploading is encrypted throughout the process and works with Windows PCs and Intel-based Macs.

If trouble strikes and a user loses some or all of his files, he can simply go back to Backblaze's site and download the required files. Backblaze already has a consumer-oriented service that costs $5 per computer per month for unlimited storage.

As compelling as its service might be, Backblaze is competing in a crowded space. Both Mozy and Carbonite are doing a fine job of attracting customers. But by using a flat rate, Backblaze is hoping to set itself apart from competing services that charge based on the amount of data that's uploaded. Mozy, for example, charges companies a standard fee of $3.95 plus $0.50 per gigabyte per month for its service.

While online data storage is becoming more commonplace, it is still a risk. For its part, Backblaze said: "Backblaze goes to great lengths to ensure data is safe and to ensure customers are happy. While we would certainly give a business a refund if data was lost (simply out of good customer service)...we don't believe anything can actually cover for the value of the lost data."

Check out Webware's hands-on review: "Backblaze: Possibly world's easiest online backup"

Updated at 1:15 p.m. PST with comment from Backblaze.

McAfee Online Backup has a lot of options and a rudimentary interface that could be intimidating for novices.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

McAfee, one of the world's largest Internet security providers, wants to go one step further in keeping your data safe. It now offers to store your backup data for you.

The company announced Thursday the availability of its McAfee Online Backup, an online backup service that automatically uploads data from your computer's hard drive to a remote server via the Internet.

While online backup services are nothing new and have been available for a long time from many providers, such as Carbonite, Memeo, or Cuku, the main difference with the new McAfee Online Backup service is that it's one of a few that offer unlimited storage space.

For a fixed annual fee of $60, you can back up as much data as you want. This could possibly the best deal around for online backup, especially for anyone with a lot of important data and a high-speed Internet connection.

Other than the generous amount of storage, according to McAfee, its new service, which is powered by Mozy, is secure and comes with easy-to-use software.

I tried the software out briefly, and it was, indeed, easy to install and get the first backup up and running.

Once you have registered an account with McAfee, you can download the software and install it on your computer, much like you would do with the company's security software. When the install is finished, the software tests the speed of your Internet connection, which later helps determine how long it will take to get the first backup done.

The software offers a lot of options, such as Bandwidth Throttle that limits how much of the Internet connection is used for the data upload, and Backup Speed that lets you choose either fast or slow backups, to lessen the impact on the computer's performance.

McAfee Online Backup can automatically detect and find important data, including bookmarks, e-mail, contacts, documents, photos, and so on, to back up for you. You can also manually back up any folders of your choosing. Once everything is set, the software will take care of the backing up on its own. Depending on the amount of data and the quality of the Internet connection, the first backup can take a very long time (perhaps days), but after that, only data that has been changed will be backed up.

It's worth noting, though, that even when you set the backup speed to optimize for fast backup, the software seems to upload data rather slowly. If you have a cable connection and have tens or hundreds of gigabytes, expect the initial backup to take days to complete. Also, the software's unfriendly interface and the overwhelming amount of unexplained options could be intimidating to novice users.

Nonetheless, overall, this seems to be a decent backup solution and could be the most affordable for those who have a lot of data to back up. If you don't have already have a reliable backup service, consider trying it out, as it comes with a 30-day money back warranty.

I'm always intrigued by backup tools for Web services that don't really need backup. TweetSaver is no exception. This paid service backs up (almost) everything you've ever posted to Twitter, along with private messages and replies from other users. It then adds an extra layer of utility on top of it, like a search tool that's limited to just your messages, simple sharing options for each message, as well as a way to assign a tag to each tweet for categorization.

Of course the usefulness of all of this hinges on Twitter being down and/or somehow losing all of your data. However, based on Twitter's uptime over the past year, you have to ask yourself if it's worth the cost of $20 a year. That's pretty steep considering there are some free Twitter backup solutions like TweeTake and TweetBackup that do many of the same things.

It's also worth pointing out why you wouldn't need this service for some of the features it's advertising. For one, Twitter's search tool can be limited to just your tweets if you use the from: operator. TweetSaver is also only capable of retrieving your last 3,200 tweets, so if you've got more than that, they're not going to be archived. This in itself is a limitation of Twitter's API, but should be noted if you have 40,000 tweets and think it, or any other service, is going to be able to grab them all.

I do like the idea of tagging tweets though. Crafty Twitter users have already found subtle ways to tag their Tweets by using hashes (#'s), although there's no way to go back to old messages and add them in. It can also be impossible if you're running out of space in an outgoing tweet. Below is a demo of how it works. I'm getting access later tonight and will update if it's got any hidden goodies that make it worth the price:

Lifestream Backup is a new service that backs up your data from a handful of popular online services including Flickr, Twitter, BaseCamp, Google Docs, and WordPress. You just provide it with your log-in credentials (or give it permission through authentication), and it quietly makes a daily or weekly backup of all your data from each site. It can then be viewed and downloaded if one of those places suffers an outage or data loss.

For $30 a year you get 20GB of storage, which is shared across all of the different services and hosted on Amazon's S3. If you have your own S3 account it's only $15 for the whole year, and it does not impose any storage limits since you're paying for that separately through Amazon. (Note: The prices are slightly lower than these for the next 10 days as part of the site's launch.)

You pick which services you want to hook it up to, and it will back them up automatically.

(Credit: CNET)

To give it a good test drive I tried it on my Flickr and Twitter accounts, as well as my Delicious bookmarks and Google documents. It took a little under a day to pull everything in, although the length of time it takes depends both on when it begins its backup, and how much you have on each service. The only exception was Delicious, which was never imported despite me providing the correct credentials.

For Twitter it saved all of my past tweets in an XML file which could not be viewed in Firefox, IE, or Chrome. Instead I had to open it up in Windows Notepad and parse through coding wrappers to get to each tweet. They were all there though, going all the way back to 2007. Not a bad start, but the presentation left something to be desired; a spreadsheet would have been nicer.

As for Google Docs, what's nice is that it can grab documents from multiple Google accounts. I had it hooked up to two of mine. It pulled them in just fine, although it did not mark which account was which. It also does not tell you what type of document each saved item is. If they're text files this isn't a problem since they display right in your browser. If they're spreadsheets or presentations though, you have to save them to your hard drive and open them in something like Excel.

Of all of the services I tested, Flickr took the longest, and with good reason--photos are big. I've got more than 3,200 photos stored on Flickr. For size reasons, it does not download the full-quality version of each photo, which admittedly would fill up your 20GB quite quickly (my 12 megapixel shots run around 3MB to 4MB a pop). Nonetheless, I found this to be a major shortcoming, especially for pixel-peeping snobs like me who like to zoom into the details of large photos. It also did not keep any of the categorization I had worked so hard on back over on Flickr. Sets, tags, descriptions--none of that gets backed up.

Lifestream Backup's archive pages are not much to look at, but they do save your data, and let you download it in case one of those sites is down.

(Credit: CNET)

I'd also like to see it do a better job at presenting the files. For instance, it shows when the files were backed up, but does not let you see when they were originally created. You also cannot download your files in bulk. Instead it must be done one at a time. For retrieving single files this obviously isn't a problem, but if you're trying to re-archive an entire gallery of photos, or folder full of documents it can be time-consuming.

Faults aside, I think Lifestream Backup is really on to something, and has big potential. Many of the services it backs up have very comprehensive backup systems of their own. That doesn't mean diddly when they go down though. If you're using any of them for business and want a surefire way to access your content, Lifestream Backup provides that. The one weak point there is if the source service is also using Amazon S3, which is what powers Lifestream Backup, then you really are out of luck until S3 comes back online.

The Undelete Plus 3.0 software.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

I've been raving a lot lately about the importance of backing up, and it seems I still haven't done enough to get my point across.

Case in point: since my most recent backup-related post, I have received multiple e-mails asking how to retrieve files that have been accidentally deleted.

The right question is: Is it even possible to retrieve lost files? And the answer is, it depends. Once you have deleted a file (and even emptied the Recycle Bin), the information from the file is still on the hard drive. As long as the same spot of hard disk hasn't been used by another file, it's possible to get that file back. So, the earlier you try to recover, the more likely it is you will be successful.

Note that during a normal operation, a computer does a lot of writing to the hard drive, because it uses hard drive space as scrap notes for different computations. If you need to recover a lot of data from a main hard drive, where the operation system is installed, it's best to put that hard drive into another computer to do the recovery.

There are many software applications that can recover data, and I was given the opportunity to try out the new 3.0 version of Undelete Plus Tuesday. This is the update to the free version of Undelete Plus 2.93, which can be found at Download.com.

Compared with the free version, this update's new interface is much easier to use. ... Read more

E-mails sent to a non-Hotmail address have been copied to a folder within a Hotmail account in Windows Live Mail.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

I blogged about Gmail's new feature that helps you migrate from other Web-based e-mail services to Gmail and I have received a lot of e-mails asking if there's a way to back up an offline POP3 e-mail archive to an online e-mail service.

The answer is yes, but depending on what e-mail clients you use, it can require a fair amount of work. If you're using Outlook Express, for example, it's fairly easy. If you use Thunderbird, however, there will be a few extra steps.

The Thunderbird <-> Outlook Express archive convert tool.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

First, you will need a Hotmail account, if you don't yet have one; it's free to sign up. After that, download and use Windows Live Mail to connect with the Hotmail account. This process is pretty straightforward.

Windows Live Mail synchronizes with your Hotmail account, which means all the e-mails you have downloaded to your computer will remain on the Hotmail server and be available for you to view using a Web browser.

Apart from Hotmail.com and Live.com e-mail accounts, Windows Live Mail can also handle other types of accounts, including POP3. When you have multiple e-mail accounts with Windows Live Mail, each account will have a separate set of "Inbox," "Sent Items," "Drafts," and so on, as well as other user-created folders.

If you want to upload an existing Outlook Express e-mail archive to your Hotmail account, first run Windows Live Mail and import your Outlook Express messages. (To do this, press Alt-F then choose "Import" on the menu). Once the import process is done, create a new folder within your Hotmail account and name it, say, "POP3 backup." You can create different folders for different groups of e-mails. After that, you can drag and drop or copy messages from the POP3 import into these new folders.

Now all you need to do is sync the Hotmail account and voila! You will see those added folders and e-mails you've just imported on the Hotmail server. This means you can access them wherever you are via a browser and they are saved in Hotmail server.

The sync process can take a long time if you have a big POP3 archive (and a slow connection), and, of course, you can't sync any archive larger than the space allowed by Hotmail, which is 5GB.

If you use Outlook, you can first use Outlook Express to import Outlook's archive before doing the process. Basically, you can use Outlook Express as the intermediary for the import process.

An e-mail sent to a non-Hotmail account has been backed up to the Hotmail server and can be viewed by a Web browser.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

For ThunderBird users, you can use the eml2mbox function of this free conversion tool called IMAPSize to convert Thunderbird's e-mail archive into Outlook Express' format.

Of course, once you have those e-mails in a Hotmail account, you can always import them into Gmail by using the new migration tool. It's good to keep data at multiple places anyway.

So make this your weekend project and back up those precious messages.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

Backing up data is important and should be done often. But remembering and knowing how to do it is a different story.

With this in mind, Memeo--an online digital company that offers a variety of online services such as photo sharing --has released a backup solution for business users that will help keep track of backing up data. Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 is tied to an online console, from which an admin user can remotely view the status of backups of other users. This means that once it's installed on network computers, a single admin can oversee the backup status for the whole business.

The admin user can send the remote user, via e-mail, a license to download or software to install. After that the admin can view the status and then contact the user of a particular computer if something is wrong, or to make sure that the user is backing up data regularly.

Unfortunately, for now, there's not much else the admin user can do. It would be much more helpful if he or she could initiate the backup itself or make the software send a pop-up message to remind the local user to start a backup. Memeo's representatives say that this is along the lines with what the company is working on for future releases of the software.

Other than that, Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 is a standard wizard-driven backup software that offers a variety of backup options, including backing up to an FTP server and to Memeo online storage. Backup to an FTP site offers an option for you to make a personal "online" backup. It also allows for differential backups and backups to local/network folders or removable drives.

Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 works with all versions of Windows 32-bit and 64-bit and is available now for $76 per license, which is rather expensive considering the limited functionality of the online console. However as this online console feature is rather unique and if you are an existing customer of Memeo's online backup service, this software will make a good addition.

If you just want good backup software, I would strongly recommend GFI Backup Home Edition, which, apart from the online console and the tie to Memeo online storage, offers the same options and more, including the ability to back up to an FTP site. Best of all, it is yours for free.

(Credit: Download.com)

Cucku on Monday further enhanced its online backup service with the announcement of Cucku Backup Pro.

Previously, the company had been offering a free, nonpro version of the solution.

Unlike most traditional online backup services that store your data at a center, Cucku doesn't provide any storage space. Instead, it offers a way for you to put your personal data on a friend's computer. This means your backup storage space is as big as the unused hard disk on that computer.

The Cucku's Backup Pro now enhances this service by adding support for multiple partners. This means you can spread your data to more than one friend's computer. At the same time, you can also use your computer to host the backups of multiple friends. The software even allows you to manage others' backups.

With these new features, Cucku's Backup Pro is intended for home users and those who need their backup replicated to multiple computers for better protection against disasters. Also, this makes Cucku a viable backup solution for small businesses.

Cucku Backup Pro cost $49.95 for three concurrent installs. While I think this is worth it, LaCie's Wuala offers a similar solution for free. Nonetheless, Cucku's existing, nonpro, single-partner backup solution remains the same and is free for everyone to use.

Hewlett-Packard is killing the online backup service Upline. It's a pity, not because Upline was a great service itself--it had reliability issues--but because Upline was built primarily with technology from Titanize, a company HP acquired. Titanize was a great unknown online storage app, offering not just backup, but Web-based access to files, and computer-to-computer file synchronization. Now both Upline and Titanize are gone.

The online storage space is crowded, so one can't really fault HP for withdrawing from a competitive market where it didn't stand out. For online backup, I recommend Carbonite or Mozy (colleague Tom Merritt swears by JungleDisk). For Web storage and sharing, there's Box.net and Dropbox. For computer-to-computer sync, I like Windows Live Sync.

Upline users have until March 31 to recover any files they want from the system. HP will be giving users a full (not pro-rated) refund of fees paid to the system.

Previously: Hands on with HP's online backup application, Upline.