I’ve been working with numerous mashups lately and put one together for places I have been during my life. Just seeing the places on one picture shows how little of the world I have seen and increases my desire to fill the map out some more.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Searching for the appropriate online backup is not easy their are numerous companies to choose fro that offer different business models. I stuck with looking at some of the more popular backup services such as Dropbox, Mozy and humyo. These three offer a freemium model, where you get an intial 2-5 GB for free the after that you can pay a monthly or yearly fee for an unlimited amount of data to be backed up online.

After looking at and trying those backup service providers. I figure it could be cheaper and easier to find some good SW that will upload backup to my FTP site where I have unlimited space. There is a good article from Lifehacker that gave me some options to choose from for Windows 7.

http://lifehacker.com/398229/five-best-windows-backup-tools

After some initial research I settled on evaluating both SyncBack and Acronis. These both  fit the type of application I was looking for.  Options needed were:

• Ability to connect to my FTP site and upload backup data.
• Ability to schedule periodic backups and run in the background.
• Ability to restore backup data.
• Low cost to purchase.

I did some due diligence on these products by downloading the trail versions and going through the process of trying to backup my drive.

After downloading Acronis True Image I thought the user interface was very clean and straightforward. I was disappointed through when I setup a FTP site in the SW to use as a upload location. Acronis True Image kept crashing as the application as it was trying to establish a connection. Acronis True Image normally retails for $50 but it is on sale now for $30, making it the same price as SyncBack.

After installing SyncBack, I was able to establish a connection with my FTP site and upload files it created. SyncBack lets you configure many more options in the setup which can cause confusion to users. One feature I liked was the ability to enter different profiles in which you can create separate backups if you want. For example if I wanted to send a full copy of my HD to an external drive and want to backup just my documents to my FTP site I would create two profiles that could run simultaneously or in a queue.

One feature I like in both Acronis True Image and SyncBack is that they compare files in your backup with the time stamp of the same file on your local machine to check if it needs to be backed up again. Since most of my files don’t change much this will save a large amount of time when backing up files after the initial backup.

In the end I will be purchasing SyncBack. Although you will need to the software to restore you old files if your drive goes bad it is the best choice for backup that gives me a cheap reliable way to schedule my backup to both my external drive and FTP site.