Our View: Whom do you trust?

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Trust is the biggest selling point an online backup service can have, yet some services have proven about as trustworthy as a used car salesman.

Amazon S3 has been hit by frequent crashes, prompting questions about whether it meets its SLAs for uptime. HP Upline stumbled coming out of the gate in April. EMC ticked off customers with a sharp price increase after it acquired Mozy, then rescinded it five months later; it still draws complaints about the time it takes to restore files.

If you can't trust Amazon, HP and EMC, where does that leave smaller startups that want to host your files? In the case of The Linkup (aka MediaMax), nowhere. The online service went out of business in early August, notifying customers to download their files before they were deleted. AOL is also looking to send Xdrive to the recycle bin, unless it can sell it off first.

As with used car salesmen, we're sure there are online backup providers you can trust. Just take care to check them out carefully before signing on.

--Dave Raffo

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This was first published in September 2008

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