Best Online Backup Overall 2012

To complete our week looking at the best online backup services of 2012 for Backup Awareness Month it is time to announce the top online backup services list. Unlike some other websites that release a top ten list every month I only redo this list occasionally when I feel the online backup offering consumer backup have made some significant changes. It has been almost roughly eight months since I updated the top ten online backup services and in that time I have done several new reviews of services and there has been some new features and other changes in the online backup industry.

Top 10 Consumer Online Backup Companies

1. Backblaze – Read our review
2. CrashPlan – Read our review
3. SOS Online Backup – Read our review
4. Carbonite – Read our review
5. SpiderOak – Read our review
6. IDrive – Read our review
7. SugarSync – Read our review
8. ElephantDrive – Read our review
9. AltDrive – Read our review
10. Mozy – Read our review

There are a number of changes and new entries on the top ten list that are worth mentioning.

SOS Online Backup

This service has risen up on the list by offering several new features like Facebook backup, a Mac version, new Android and iOS apps. There is a reason they are chosen by PC Magazine.

ElephantDrive

It is nice to have ElephantDrive on the list again. They seemed to not do much for quite a while but in the last year they have made several new enhancements to their service like a Mac client, syncing and sharing.

AltDrive

I only reviewed AltDrive in January of 2012 and it is a company focused on online backup without being distracted by other features. If you need a backup service for Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix AltDrive is a contender.

Online backup continues to be a growth industry in 2012 and the number of services that have started in the last year reflects that room to grow. It is important that consumers do their research on the companies that they are thinking of using for protecting their files. There are a number of companies that have exploded on to the cloud backup industry that make huge promises, like large amounts of free space or lots of features, but their software or business model are not able to support their promises. For that reason I encourage people to take advantage of the free trials and free options to test services to make sure they fill their needs. If you run into problems with a free trial or free service the odds are it will not be improved by purchasing the full version.