3 Best Ways to Save / Back Up Data Online for Free


Online backup is a lot more than just backup, it a time and data management tool in its own right, and many services have powerful features which can help synchronize your data across multiple PCs, allowing you to stream your media from a Smartphone and allow others to download selected files and folders using a password protected link. In this article I will discuss various ways that you can get subscriptions to online backup services for free.

3 Best Ways to Save / Backup your Data Online

Dropbox
Dropbox is the webs favourite online backup service, due to its large presence in the social media space. Dropbox offers 2GB backup space entirely free, which you can use to manage files on a Mac, PC or Linux computer, as well as manage files on your iPhone. What’s neat is that users can increase their free storage space by referring their friends, non-students get 250MB per referral, and students get 500MB per referral.

SugarSync
You may be thinking, 2GB for free is nice, but I want large free space, and I don’t want to nag my friends to sign up either. Well SugarSync offers and whopping 5GB of free space right from the get go, and if you’re in the mood to nag your friends, you can get a 500MB increase to your storage space by referring friends, to a maximum of 10GB. What I like particularly about SugarSync is the iPhone app which allows you to manage all my files remotely, so if you don’t have your computer with you, you can easily email files to yourself from the app and work away from a borrowed computer.

LiveDrive
Now if 5GB free storage space isn’t enough for you, you may want to try your hand at Windows SkyDrive, if you have a hotmail account; you already have access to the account and can get to work straight away. SkyDrive offers 25GB of online storage space. The downside is that unlike SugarSync and Dropbox, SkyDrive does not have a desktop application which will automatically synchronise your files for you. Microsoft does not support third party software from accessing SkyDrive either; however it hasn’t stopped developers like SDExplorer from coming up with a third party app that will allow you to use SkyDrive as an additional hard drive on your computer. It works pretty flawlessly, and you can open and work with files using SDExplorer without any issues.

Notable mentions
There are other noteworthy providers of free online backup, Mozy offers 2GB absolutely free, OpenDrive offers 5GB free, Box.net offers 5GB space free, but has a 25MB file size cap.

There isn’t a shortage of online backup services offering free storage space, and if you’re not already benefiting from the convenience and security of online backup, now is the time to get started.

Guest post written by Karim, the webmaster of online backup services, where he reviews the top online backup providers available today, where you can also submit your own user reviews.

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April 27, 2011 by: Prasanth Chandra

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