SOS Online Backup

Description

SOSOnline Backup your computer files online

Your data is at risk. All hard drives are subject to failure. Don't lose your precious life's moments and hard work (pictures, videos, documents). Hard drive crashes, computer loss/theft, fire, etc. can be devastating. SOS delivers simple, powerful and inexpensive online data backup. Backup your entire computer to a USB drive nightly or engage LiveProtect™ to have SOS watch your files and provide continuous real-time data protection.

SOS Online Backup has been a PCMag favorite for years, and the company continues to improve its online backup service. A new pricing plan adds to its attractiveness: $9.95 a month for five PCs and up to 50GB of data looks good even compared with all-you-can-eat services like Carbonite ($54.95/year, 3 stars), which charge $4.95 a month for just one PC. SOS Online Backup Home Edition remains a favorite for its abundance of useful features and its clear, friendly interface.

"Backup Your PC With SOS Online Backup & get Protection from viruses, crashes, theft & natural disasters."

Interface: Choosing What to Back Up and When:
The wizard interface of SOS hasn't changed much in appearance since I last reviewed it, but the latest version of SOS adds a "So Simple" system scan for files that would commonly be desirable backup candidates—office documents, images, music, and video. The first time you run SOS Online Backup, a message box pops up asking if you want to run this. And if that's not enough, the top choice in Step 1 of its Wizard, "What do you want to back up," is Common Files and Folders, which offer the typical Desktop, Documents, Favorites, and Pictures options. Just check these, and in most cases you're golden, but you also have the option to select any folder on your hard drive. Unlike Carbonite, SOS also lets you choose external USB drives and keys, and even network drives. But for the last to work, I had to disable my antivirus app during installation, and 64-bit Windows 7 had some issues with the feature.

Another way to choose files or folders for backup is simply to right click on their entry in Windows Explorer and choose "Protect with SOS Online Backup" from the resulting menu. This is the only Explorer option: Carbonite goes deep with this, actually marking each protected file and folder with a color-coded dot.

A third way to configure your backup set is to launch the service's Classic View, which offers more detailed control. From this interface, you can drag and drop files for backup, browse all your disk contents, start a backup immediately, or restore particular files and folders.

SOSOnline Backup your computer files online

During file restore, you'll see a message box telling you exactly which files and versions are being brought down, their sizes, and how many left to go. In my tests, restore worked like a charm, and I didn't encounter any difficulties as I did with Carbonite.

SOS's Web-based restore site not only lets you get back your lost files, it even lets you play or display content you've stored online—music, pictures, video. Big buttons let you show just photos or just documents. You can choose which protected PC to search, or search across all and do full restores from any. The files come in a ZIP archive after you request them from this secure HTTPS site.

Sharing and Extras
SOS Online Backup offers the most extras of any online backup: File sharing, viewing, Liveprotect, archiving, versioning. Another bonus is SOS's excellent iPhone app, which not only lets you download and view files in your online storage, but also share them via links in email. A local backup option is another plus, but I wish it let you simply use the same chosen backup set of files as the one you chose for online storage, as Norton Online Backup does.

Save Yourself With SOS
With its reasonable price covering five PCs, Live Protect, versioning, and many more unique capabilities, SOSOnline Backup Home Edition remains our Editors' Choice for personal online backup. If you don't think 50GB is enough to cover all your home PCs and just need to protect one mother ship PC with a lot more storage, you may be happier with an unlimited competitor like Mozy or Carbonite, but you'll miss out on a lot of very useful capabilities SOS offers that they don't.