Iron Mountain supply their software to their Partners via two main options: Subscription and licence. Subscription based Partners use very latest technology and source their data centres directly from Iron Mountain therefore receiving updates and hot fixes when any issues arise. This means that their customers will always have the most recent versions of the software which in this case is capable of backing up and restoring the widest range of file types.

Your experience suggests your desktop support company are in fact using a licensed version of the connected software which will be limited to the software they purchased and may be some years old. By choosing a vendor that scrimps on technology you’ve unfortunately been left with a bitter taste of the connected product. I would advise you take this up with your provider and find out what version they are running. Alternatively, going straight to Iron Mountain themselves and asking for a referral to a trusted partner and trialling it, or even buying directly from IM will ensure you can always receive the latest version.

Glad you’re still looking into Online Backup though, Hope you find something that works!

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Best of all – It’s free for personal use. Give it a shot.. or.. if you want a permanent IT friend for life, recommend our CrashPlan PRO product to your IT department. They’ll keep you flush with high technology for the remainder of your life as thanks.

Phil, I’ve recommended Carbonite to others. I think it’s a really good solution. For my personal use I prefer Jungle Disk. For work I didn’t go that direction because of the fees. I’d have to deal with paying for it with my work CC and then expensing it. For personal use, it sounds like a very good way to go.

You can install Unison without Cygwin, though, on Windows. And you don’t need a remote server either, just a mapped drive, which you have.

For our use case I decided (for a number of reasons too long to list here) that we just wanted simply file mirroring. The downsides of using RoboCopy for mirroring are:

1) no binary delta, ie it copies any file that has changed even if that change is simply one bit.

2) I have to do the *.vbs calling *.bat to make it totally silent.

3) No compression.

4) No GUI to set which files get copied (yes, that might be a pro, not a con)

The big reasons why I went with simple mirroring are:

1) Already using version control for most files which I might want to “roll back” in time

2) Needed to make a decision and get it implemented on 2-3 user laptops in 1 day. Not much time to tinker.

3) Need to be easy to validate backups. A copy has very few moving parts and a user can just look in a directory and see if the latest backed up files are there. No need for client software or other abstractions.

I like Rsync, but since the machines are Windows I was concerned about the hassle of installing Cygwin, then getting the scripts right and then getting them to execute silently. Plus I’d have to get an rsync server running on my server (it’s also Win). So I went the easy route.