Overall Rating
SOS data online backup is an additional feature-rich service. PC Magazine gave it an Editor’s Choice award, and PC Pro also rates it highly also. Its Home version is a bit expensive (*est. $20 for 2 GB and up) compared with others like Mozy and Carbonite. Businesses have a wide range of options depending on online storage space. SOS Online Backup does tout certain unique features, such as unlimited versions of files, network drive support for all users (which is usually reserved for business accounts at some other services) and file sharing through e-mail. You can also mail SOS the files for backup on a DVD for the preliminary upload so you don’t have to knot up your computer for days to get through it. The SOS client can also help you administer local backups to a CD, DVD or external drive. SOS data online backup keeps your files safe off-site, backing up essential documents from any number of PC’ss to SOS’s secure server network. This sevice caught my attention because it had two unique features: Continuous backup and backup of open files.
In our test, the initial step was selecting files for backup. SOS aims to make the process as simple as 1-2-3 but wasn’t entirely successful. The app offers a extravagant seven ways to choose files for backup, including several ways to search files and several more to select individual files. In most cases, you will just select folders and use the Intelligent Filters option to limit the file types backed up in those folders. As you make selections, SOS tracks the total space required so that you don’t go over your plan limit.
Plans start as low as $3.70 per year for 50MB. Data Deposit Box would cost 50 cents (a penny a megabyte), and Spare Backup has a 1GB minimum for roughly $96 per year. 10GB would be about $237. SOS also offers a separate Media Edition that protects only image, audio, and video media files for roughly half price. Mozy is still the low bidder here, with 2GB for free and 10GB for $29.95 per year, but likely with some effort you can obtain free storage on SOS, too. If you refer three associates who sign up for a storage plan that’s equal to or larger than yours, each month they all pay for service that gives you a gratis month.
With SOS, you launch backups physically or schedule them to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. Between 
scheduled data online backups, the LiveProtect constant remote backup feature keeps your files up-to-date. The moment you save a protected file, LiveProtect compares it with the previous version, extracts the differences, further compresses the difference data, and up-loads it. Note that even at some stage in manual or scheduled backups, SOS still minimizes its up-load requirements using this same process. LiveProtect also backs up any brand new files that match your criteria. SOS keeps all file versions indefinitely: There’s no limit, they don’t “age out,” and they don’t count as part of your storage space. A 10MB document with a hundred stored revisions still just counts as 10MB. Some of your most important files may be constantly in use and locked, for example, Outlook data files or a business database. You won’t see anything special when SOS backs up these open files; it handles them just as it would any other file. This is a very promising feature.
SOS secures your files throughout the backup process including encrypting the data before uploading, transmiiting it using a secure protocol, and stores it in an encrypted form. The Recover page lists all backed-up files and versions in a hierarchical tree-style view. It can also search by name, date, size, and type. Just check off the folders or files you want and click Recover. If you don’t want to wait for a huge recovery through the Internet, for $30 the company will overnight a DVD of your recovered documents. You can also log into your backup set from any Internet-equipped computer, and copy or recover files or file versions one at a time, or share any backed-up file with a friend. For sharing SOS automatically sends an e-mail with a link to the shared file including password-protection.
We installed the SOS client and defined a set of files for backup using the Protection Wizard. It was easy to select common folders like My Documents and Desktop and to choose other nonsystem folders for protection, but when I made a folder selection that exceeded my storage limit, SOS rejected the folder entirely. We wished it would provisionally accept the overly hefty selection and then allow it to prune it back, the way Mozy and Spare Backup do. We turned on the Intelligent Filter option to back up only particular document types and was allowed to select all the folders I wanted. We used the custom-search option to find and select our Microsoft Outlook data files. With the backup set defined, we fired a full backup.
Next we tried a full restore and checked the top-level box in the tree view of obtainable files to select all of them. The recovery process seemed less forgiving of interruptions to the Internet connection than the backup process had been.
In Michael Muchmore’s review (PC Magazine) he seems a little too progressive to look over the rough edges in SOS Online Backup. For instance, he admits that support wasn’t very helpful when he ran into problems but then disguises that because the SOS client is nicely intuitive and clear. Out take is that users are likely to need help at some point. Steward Andrews at PC Pro provides a more balanced assessment, where he reports incremental changes being backed up within seconds (much faster than most other services), but he ran into a bit of trouble installing the software on a Vista machine.
SOS Internet Backup isn’t an inexpensive data online backup solution, but it does let you start small, protecting a handful of really important files, and it can scale up all the way to a 100GB. There’s no cap on the number or age of previous versions stored and SOS claims they keep them forever. And continuous backup means your files are always up-to-date. Support is provide via email, phone, chat, email & remote desktop. SOS seems a bit pricing for individuals, but certainly may worth the extra features for businesses.
How SOS Backup Works Videos:
