i tested mozy, an online backup service, and was impressed. mozy has been running a lot of commercials on tv lately and it was enough to make me get serious about protecting some important computer data on something other than backup drives that would do me no good if my house caught on fire (heaven forbid). mozy is good and the price is great but then i looked into idrive and i was more impressed.

keep in mind all the services mentioned let you setup a free account with limited storage capacity (2GB) so that you can try them out before paying for upgraded and expanded storage.

idrive does have a storage limit, 150GB, whereas mozy and carbonite boast unlimited storage space. however, idrive offers some features that those don’t have. the feature i like more than anything with idrive is ‘versioning’. you can actually restore an old version of a file that you have been backing up. also, if you delete the files locally you can leave them online; mozy and carbonite will remove deleted files from their server when the sync happens. idrive can be setup to do that if you want, but it’s like a nice safety net for accidental and unintentional deletes.

if you have important files you don’t want to lose you should consider one of these services.. all of them are worth the money, i just prefer some of the idrive features enough to deal with 150GB storage limitation over the unlimited storage offered by mozy and carbonite.

also, if you’re an iphone owner idrivelite is a nice free iphone app for backing up your contacts online.