I’m using Carbonite for backup (which is brilliant), though for people just wanting to backup their digital photos, ProtectMyPhotos seems like a good choice.  Like Carbonite, it sits in the system tray quietly backing up photos to a secure server.

The main benefits I can see of using this service over Carbonite are:

  • Easy sharing of photos.  Ideal for sharing photos with family and friends without having to manually upload them to a photo sharing service (like Flickr).
  • Versioning, so that if you modify a photograph, you can restore a previous version from the backup at any time
  • Facility to view photos online, in a web-based explorer-like Ajax driven interface (not sure if this also allows files other than photos to be downloaded though)

Personally, these are a features I’d like to see Carbonite add to its service, as I’m sure the vast majority of users are using it to backup digital photographs, and being able to easily share them would make life a lot easier, as would a web-based file browser to download files remotely.

There’s some confusion about whether the service offers unlimited service, or is capped at 40gb.  The website says unlimited, though I’ve seen references to the 40gb limit elsewhere, including the product sheet I received from Jim Wells (from RLM PR, who represent ProtectMyPhotos).

Jim also pointed out that the service also allows users to backup up music files and other documents in addition to digital photographs.  However, I think their focus on digital photographs (probably to differentiate them from all the other similar backup services out there).

Carbonite integrates directly with Internet Explorer, adding a new item to control panel and an item to the right click menu, whereas ProtectMyPhotos doesn’t.  Furthermore, there doesn’t appear to be any way to force ProtectMyPhotos to backup certain files, and the types of documents it can backup are restricted to those listed.

ProtectMyPhotos is $40 per year, and Carbonite, $50.  Unless you’re going to use the sharing and versioning features, I think the latter is the better option as it allows you to backup all your important files, rather than just your images, and has unlimited storage, though 40gb will go a long way!  My backup is only 20gb.

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