UK based online Backup providers

Are you backing up your computer? Despite the amount of important data we hold on our computers - both business and personal - the shocking reality is that even in this day and age there are many people that don’t backup their data at all. Backing up to a local external drive is a start - and if you are on a Mac then Time Machine is a great tool for doing just that. But local backups only really protect you from system failures, if you ever have the misfortune to be burgled or your house to go up in flames then your external drive is likely to be lost as well. This is when offsite backups come into their own. Thankfully with our modern fast internet connections dropping off an external drive to your parents in law every week is no longer required! There is now a myriad of online backup providers that will allow you to seamlessly backup your system to 'the cloud' in the background, giving you ultimate peace of mind.

So who and where should you back up to?

Most of the larger online backup providers are unsurprising in the United States but with US legislation now allowing Uncle Sam to access your data on any US server with a court order, storing your online backup in the UK is definitely something worth considering and given the added volatility of currency markets it is something we would recommend. Once you are with a provider it can be a headache to move so knowing that your subscription fee isn't going to suddenly fluctuate based on the exchange rate is far less stressful.

Selected UK Companies of course means discounting the major cloud backup providers such as Crashplan and Carbonite as they are all US based. We have reviewed a number of UK companies that offer online backup and US companies that offer 'UK based' services such as Mosy. To be honest we were frustrated at both the cost and the scale of the companies, but there was one company that stood out which was able to rival the established US offerings and that was Livedrive.

Livedrive is one of the UK’s leading provider of online backup and we chose them because the have both the scale to meet the needs of customers both small and large and provided a truly cost effective offering with their unlimited backup plans starting at £5/month. They also offer a free trial if you wanted to try before committing.

We will update this post with additional UK based companies as we find them - if we think they are worth a mention :)