Looking for the Best Free Online Backup System?

A Real Estate Agent from MRIS sent a note to us yesterday asking for information about online backup. Because online back up is not a core real estate technology solution, we do not have a product category on the site for it. However, in an effort to answer the question, we did a little research.

We found a company called ADrive. You can visit their website and set up a free account. With the free account you get 50GB of Free Storage – yes – not a typo – 50 GB of Free Storage.

This is an amazing offer, and it essentially allows most real estate professionals enough room to back up their entire computer – everything – for free. There is nothing worse in life than loosing everything – all of your data – every document, every photo, and every contact.

Here at RE Technology, we all backup our computers all day long automatically using Time Machine. Time Machine is software that schedules backups of computers onto an integrated 2 Terabyte drive that is part of our wireless network. It is totally seamless and fully automatic. If you are a MAC – that is definitely the way to go.

Here are a number of other sites we found on our search quest for the best place to get free storage.

At 5 Gigabites we had a few contenders – Xdrive.com, Windows Live Skydrive (requires Windows Live membership), esnips.com (max file size is 10/MB per file), Divshare.com, and 4Shared.com.

There are piles at the 2 GB range – BigUpload.com, Bonpoo, Diino, Driveway, iDrive, The Linkup, Mozy, PutPlace, and SnapDrive.

There are a pile more at 1GB – but seriously – who cares when so many others offer so much more space.

The good news is that storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. We still like to have our files on our computers where we feel like we can "touch" them and access them when offline – but the day is coming – cloud computing is in our future – just not sure how far out into the future.

On that note – Amazon S3 – the planet's largest cloud computing solution went down last week for a few hours – crushing thousands of websites who rely on them for hosting. Cloud reliability is not quite there yet – but that was the first outage in nearly a year.

If you have any questions about data backup or free online storage, please leave a comment below.

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