F-Secure Online Backup

Online back-up has its pros and cons. Because it’s using your broadband connection to copy files on to a remote server, it takes much longer than backing up to disk. On the positive side, if anything happens to your house or computer, you’ll still have a back-up of all your files that you can access from anywhere.

Features
The most important feature of an online back-up service is how much space you’re provided with. F-Secure’s offering is as good as it gets – unlimited space for as many files as you need to store. You can access your files from anywhere via a secure website and the process is fully automated, though you can tweak its settings manually if you wish.

Performance
There’s nothing to complain about on the performance side – it’s your broadband that’s going to be the throttle on this service. If you don’t want it hogging your connection you can set exactly the bandwidth you want it to take up, and you can change this on the fly.

Ease of use

The software is very easy to use – you could set this up without even adjusting any of the settings and it will back-up files from your My Documents folder, along with anything else that looks valuable (because it’s a photo or a Word document and so forth). Alternatively, you can pick and choose the files and folders you want uploading, which is also very straightforward. Your files are then backed up automatically whenever you’re online.

Value for money
£49.95 per year sounds like a reasonable amount to pay for such peace of mind but it’s worth doing some maths and looking at the competition before you commit. At the time of writing, both Mozy.com and Carbonite’s similar services were competitively priced at around $55 (around £33.50) for 12 months of service – a significant saving over F-Secure’s offering. Do you want to pay more for a very similar service just for the luxury of paying in British pounds?

Interestingly, flip on to F-Secure’s US site and it’s charging just $49.99 for Online Backup – this is cheaper than Carbonite or Mozy, so why not charge a straight dollar-to-pound conversion price in 
the UK?