MyPCBackup Review and Comparison

Who is MyPCBackup for?

The good thing about MyPCBackup is that it offers unlimited backup from 4,95$ per month when you decide to commit yourself to a two year period. So if you have huge data amount that you need to backup (above 100GB) than you should definately consider a backup provider that gives you an unlimited amount. MyPCBackup is an upsell king. They want to charge you extra whereever they can. I can understand that, competition is stiff and you need to get some revenue streaming in. So if you don’t need hourly backups (for which you’d have to pay), don’t need a 30-Day rollback period and don’t mind being upsold to – consider MyPCBackup. It gets the job done, though less elegantly than BackBlaze. Also bring some time for fiddling around with it because the general settings are not ideal for hassle-free backup. But hey, they have an any time money-back-guarantee – so got ahead and try them for yourself. There is no risk.

MyPCBackup Online Backup Review

MyPCBackup is one the products of justdevelope.it, a young tech company specialised in creating “simple online solutions to the mass market in today’s complicated world of the internet.” Their first product, IntelliChat, was created back in 2007 so they have some years of experience creating software products. In this review I’ll see if they can live up to their claims and if they really created a simple online backup solution. It is one of the lesser known companies for online backups but I like to try things off the mainstream.

MyPCBackup is unfortunately one of the weaker candidates of the online backup services I have tested. The software and the workflow seems not very well thought through. Instead of offering one or the other feature they should have focused on the essential parts: ease of use, seemless backup and stability. None of which convinced me in my testing. It really frustrates me when I am forced to pay for something other providers give you for free. For example, MyPCBackup charges  19,95$ per year you if you need hourly backups. Other services like Mozy can be set to backup 12 times a day – for free. I know competition is stiff – there are hundreds of online backup services out there. But instead of milking their customers I’d rather invest in satisfying them which automatically leads to a high level of customer retention.

15 Day Trial – Useless?

I invite you to sign up for the 15 day trial. You can test the service for 15 days but for me this trial was useless. First, I couldn’t really see what exactly the conditions of the free trial are. Before I download anything to my PC I want to know what I get. Also it says “Today Only”, however I tried it for a week and I could always sign up for a free trial.

 

In the next step I at least can see how long this trial is going to last (14 days) and the good part is, I don’t need a credit card unlike SugarSync. Have a look ****at my video*** that guides you step-by-step through the sign up process.

Installation is quite straight forward. However I needed to install the software with a right-click and “Run as admin” to install it successfully. All in all, a lot of hurdles for calling it “easy”. Also if you are a Mac user there is no way you can use MyPCBackup – that’s unfortunate since I am a Mac user myself. I only use Windows to test the online backup services.

• No information on free trial
• Some hurdles during installation
• No Mac or Linux software

• No credit card required for free trial

How to backup your data with MyPCBackup

Backing up your data with MyPCBackup is really straight forward. You can let MyPCBackup select your data automatically which would take the Documents, Pictures and Downloads folders. I think even for the most basic user this is not enough. So rather go with the manual backup selection where you can comfortably select the folders you need a backup of. As always I selected my test folder of 1GB to be backed up that I can compare backup speed levels among the different providers.

The file browser is very minimalistic which I like. However, I loved the overview Mozy gave me while browsing my files such as: amount of gigabyte selected, how much of my quota I already used and the like. Mozy seems much better organized.

Now that I have set everything up I finally see the conditions under which I am working with the free trial. And they are rather useless: In trial mode it backs up only files under 5MB and up to 15MB although claimed otherwise on their site.

If you’ve read other online backup reviews on my site you know that I am a paying customer of all of the backup services I tested here. This one is no exception. Especially with such conditions on the free trial I couldn’t evaluate the service properly. So I signed up for the paid version.

• Little information on files to back up
• Only 15MB space in trial mode

• Easy file selection

Backup speed

After signing up for the paid version I can upload an unlimited amount of data. I wondered why the software client only showed me 135MB selected files for upload until I realized I needed to increase the file limit in the properties.

Especially when backing up huge amounts of data backup speed and stability is crucial. Since MyPCBackup offers unlimited backup it’s very likely that people choose to store more than 100GB in files and this can take weeks. Upload speed depends much on your connection and the backup provider can’t really influence that. However, backing up my 1GB folder took longer than with Mozy, SugarSync or BackBlaze.  It took MyPCBackup 4 hours and 20 minutes until everything has been backed up. Other services were way below the 4 hours.

Backup frequency

Standard automatic backup is daily. When you want to backup your PC hourly than you have to pay for it adding 19,95$ to your yearly bill. If you need constant off site backups your should definately consider other providers because they do this for free. No need to pay extra. However, for most of the users once a day should be enough.

Backup security

MyPCBackup encrypts your data automatically with the industry standards SSL encryption. So the transfer is as secure as possible. You can’t encrypt your data with a private key, though. So your files are potentially open to employees of MyPCBackup. This is an additional risk which I’d like to avoid if I have very sensitive data.

MyPCBackup Syncing

A good feature is the syncing folder. When you sign up for the paid account you get a 1GB additional syncing folder that works similar to Dropbox. 1GB is not much but probably enough to keep all your important documents in sync among multiple devices. If you really need syncing and backup I’d rather choose SugarSync because they have more sophisticated algorithms.

• Hourly backups cost 19,95$
• Backups seems to be taking rather long
• No personal encryption of your data

• 1GB syncing folder

Restore process

This is the moment of truth. Your PC broke down, some virus infected your hard drive or your PC just doesn’t start anymore. Now you need to restore your important data. If you hadn’t done a backup everything would be lost by now. MyPCBackup makes the restore process very easy. You just hit the “Restore” button in the client and choose a directory on your PC. So you definately need a PC up and running and the client needs to be installed. There is no option to restore via the web interface nor would they send a DVD or USB stick to your home in case of emergency.

Download of files takes long to start

If you want to restore your data you need to be patient. I didn’t select all my test files to back up but just a video of 110MB in size. This could be for example a family video shot with your  digital camera. After 5 minutes the progress bar doesn’t move so I am not really sure if the restore process is going to work eventually. After a couple of minutes, however, a window pops up saying that my files have been backed up successfully. Yeah! I only wish I had seen the progress live because one might think the program has hung up.

The Price

The price is obviously a very important part of your decision making. MyPCBackup is one of the more pricy online backup services. You can safe a lot of money if you sign up for the two year period as always. And I highly recommend once you decided on a provider to choose this kind of plan. Prices range from 5,95$ per month to 10,95$ per month when you pay on a monthly basis. But they use to give 20% off so ranges are from 4,95$ to $9,95 which is still quite expensive if you compare it to the unlimited plan of BackBlaze which only costs 5$/mo.

• Quite expensive

• Payment with credit card and PayPal

MyPCBackup Online Backup Review Summary

In a nutshell, I can’t recommend MyPCBackup confidently. There are some useful features such as unlimited storage and great customer support. However, there were just too many things that bothered me along the way starting with poor information structure on the free trial, clunky installation process and too much upselling for features that other backup providers love to give you for free. They told me that they are going to be adressing some of the things I mentioned in this review so I’ll be looking forward to testing an improved version of their service.

Restoring your data works – so if you really need your data you’ll get it. The restore process doesn’t seem to work as effortlessly as with other backup providers. I think in general the client needs an overall reprogramming and rethinking of the user interface.

Let’s see all the important specs in a general overview:

Tagged as: mypcbackup, unlimited backup