Fabrik Drives Add Online Backup

(Courtesy of Fabrik Inc.)

Saving something to "the cloud" may not sound secure. But it's a great idea to send data to professionally managed computers, even if they are off somewhere in the wisps of the Internet. New online backup services are popping up frequently, including one with a hard twist from a start-up called Fabrik.

The company is primarily about external hard drives, the kind that you plug into a PC. Now Fabrik is getting into online backup with a new line of external drives. Aimed primarily at small and home businesses, Fabrik Pro Drives back up data from the PC—and as a second line of defense, they can also save some of it to Fabrik servers in the ether. Starting at $100 for 250 gigabytes of external storage, the drives also come with 2GB of free storage. That's only enough to save documents and a few cherished photos. Unlimited storage can be had for $5 a month.

I like the idea of online backup, even if slow upload speeds make them unwieldy for large chunks of data. It could take several weeks to get even 10GB uploaded. And I only use online storage as secondary backup for some files. Nobody knows how long Fabrik or competitors like Carbonite and Streamload will be around. Maybe they have staying power. But we know from experience that services on the Internet can evaporate.