In my last post I talked about this thing called S3 from Amazon. All you need to know is that is a safe, secure and reliable storage service for uploading your files for safe keeping. The manner in which you get your files from point A (your PC) to point B (Amazon S3) is just as important.
CloudBerry Lab cloudberrylab.com has done a superb job of developing a rock solid application that does just that. The desktop version that most home user will buy is just $29.95 and the more robust server version is $79.99, a mere pittance when compared to the potential loss of data.
Someone might ask why I wouldn’t want to just get a product like Carbonite that gives you the backup and storage in one product…I have one word “proprietary”. I don’t care what promises a software company makes, I have seen enough of them come and go, and seen their applications come and go to know that you can’t count on them. But I know that Amazon will be there for the foreseeable;e future, and I also know that by selecting a software that does not use any propriety storage encryption, I will have access to my data from any other utility. You also have the option to use CloudBerry’s encryption and file versioning, which is a very cool feature. You can also enable your Amazon S3 storage is a virtual drive so you can access your back / online storage like it is another drive in your system.
I installed CouldBerry Server on Windows 2000 Server, 2003 R2 and the desktop version on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. All installations were flawless and the backs made didn’t kill my system speed and were extremely fast when compared to Carabonite and SOS Online Backup.
Overall my experience with the product has been excellent and I would highly recommend their products. And the fact that they provide free versions for non-profits and education is a real plus!