Best online backup service for small nonprofit?

Latest post 09-10-2009 12:23 PM by shipley.c. 2 replies.

Best online backup service for small nonprofit?

08-10-2009 1:22 PM

Does anyone have a recommendation regarding the best online backup service to use for a small nonprofit (best price, ease of use, and reliability)? I recently used Carbonite at home and like it so far, but what I read said it was $55 per year per computer, so that would add up with several computers to back up. With our old service, we could pay for one computer, but also include the shared documents on other computers by going through the network. What do other nonprofits use?

Re: Best online backup service for small nonprofit?

09-09-2009 3:53 PM

I did a lot of searching around on this question about 18 months ago.  The least cost backup provider that I found was Amazon Jungle Disk.  Google them and you can get the rate per GB of storage and MB of transfer.  I really like it because it keeps as many prior versions of files as you specify, it lets you set frequency of backup independently at the file or folder level, and for large files it will upload only the portion of the file that actually changed...so it saves MB of transfer.

We keep everything that needs backing up on our server.  In fact, I direct all staff NOT to use their individual PCs for work files.  This allows us to just backup one disk.  Also, the "Jungle Disk" backup is mappable as a network drive, so restoring a file (or previous version) is as simple as navigating to a mirror folder on another drive, copy, paste.

Good Luck,

John

 

Re: Best online backup service for small nonprofit?

09-10-2009 12:23 PM

Great info about how you can mount JungleDisk as a drive, I wasn't aware of that.  Thanks, John.

I have found JungleDisk to be a bit of a bear to set up, but once set it was good.  I prefered Mozy in the end, but Carbonite is also another product to take a look into.