The forgotten online backup utility: Titanize

I wanted to revisit some of the products that didn't work for me yesterday, since my personal demo demon seems to have moved on.

I'll start with Titanize, the unknown online backup product. Titanize competes with services like Mozy and Carbonite. But it offers features that the others don't, and it is worth serious consideration if you're looking for an over-the-Net backup service.

For basic backups, it's much like Mozy and Carbonite. It's easy to set up, and it runs in the background, sending your new and changed files to its secure servers. But Titanize also will back up your files to local storage like an external hard disk or a drive on your home LAN. This makes it a very good solution if you're looking to set up layered backup, using local drives for convenience and speed and off-site backup for disaster protection.

Titanize gives you Web access to your files: it lets you access your entire backup set from any Web browser. You also can share files in your backup with people via e-mail, or you can "publish" any file to the Web and Titanize will give it a static, public URL. XDrive and Box.net have similar features.

The system also will keep data synchronized between multiple PCs. This is very useful for people who use both a desktop and a laptop, although Titanize does not let you specify which folders get synced and which don't. For that, see Foldershare or BeInSync.

I like Titanize, yesterday's glitch notwithstanding. I've found that, in addition to offering a complete set of storage features, it's also very fast to back up. There's a 5GB, 30-day trial available for free; 10GB of storage costs $60 a year; an additional 40GB is another $40 a year.

Also check out the innovative Crashplan if you want to set up your own secure backup network among family or co-workers.