DISQUS

For most practical purposes, the full disk wipe will effectively destroy the data. That is, it will make it costly and annoying enough that no one will spend the time/energy/money it takes to do a recovery of data on your old drive -- unless they have a really compelling reason. If, however, a technically sophisticated and well-financed adversary (e.g. a corporation or state-actor with a reason to actually want to recover data) you will need to wipe and rewrite multiple times to have any real security. Again, for most of us this is a ridiculous scenario.

In any event, using encryption on your local disk (or with a service like elephantdrive as Dahni-El suggests) will make it much more secure and difficult to recover, with or without wiping.

For more, see:

http://lifehacker.com/software/utilities/how-to...
http://www.crn.com/security/202805361
http://www.elephantdrive.com

It sucks that the Xdrive service is ending. I used the elephantdrive transfer tool to move away - they made it so all I had to do was input my old xdrive username/password and it moved everything over to my new elephantdrive account. It took a couple of days, but it was relatively painless. Hope they fare better than Xdrive...

So far, most of these companies have given no love to Mac. Like Neil, above, I tried Carbonite originally for my Windows box . I also was frustrated with its interface (no details!) and lack of Mac compatibility, so I switched to ElephantDrive. This works much better for me, mostly because it is cross-platform and allows you to mount a network drive directly to your account.

Wow. This is a really great post - thoughtful and complete reviews, helpful background information, and a nice set of images with each service.

I've only tried two of the services (ElephantDrive and Upline), but came to pretty similar conclusions. I continue to use ElephantDrive since it really has all the functionality I was looking for, but I agree it could use a face lift. Secret hint - after chatting with their support, I got a sneak peek at a Linux client (java-based).

Apparently I had a worse experience with Upline than you did - the service was basically unavailable the whole time I tried to engage it.

Nice work!

~Vincent

The closing of Xdrive has sent a lot of us scurrying away to look for better (more viable) online storage solutions. I went with ElephantDrive after reading about it at Black Enterprise here: http://www.blackenterprise.com/cms/exclusivesop....

Maybe Earthlink will do the same for AOL dial up folks?

Someone needs to take a closer look at this. The "investors" appear to be members of the management team (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=SPBU.OB). This could certainly be taken as a sign of management's faith in the future of the company, but if you take a look at the interesting and publicly available numbers (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=SPBU.OB), something just doesn't seem right.

$0.00 in COGS. Could that possibly be true?

$25K of cash on hand and a TTM loss of over $10M?

What's up?

You might want to check out ElephantDrive too.

They keep some of the data at Amazon S3 and some on their own disks. Free account for 1 GB, paid for more.

http://www.elephantdrive.com

@ Phenom - It isn't surprising to see smart VCs invest in an idea that is good, even if it isn't new. Businesses (venture backed and otherwise) succeed because they solve problems that people have and can execute, market, and scale, not because their ideas are necessarily original. Originality just reduces competition (though it usually also reduces market size, at the outset anyway).

I'm not saying eSureIT was a good investment (in fact, I have reviewed many of these services and several of them much better), only that originality ought not to be the only criteria for venture investors..

@ Backupuser - eSureIT (from my analysis) was a perfectly reasonable piece of software for desktop use, but performed poorly on laptops in mobile situations. It terms of "retentions" and "customization," it does not distinguish itself from the field.

I asked this question on VentureBeat and haven't heard a good explanation yet - if Fabrik raised $12mm last year, how did they buy SimpleTech for $43mm? Any ideas?