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  We tested iDrive with its free Basic tier, which offers 10GB of storage. [credit:
  Jim Salter ]

If there’s one rule of computing every system administrator preaches, it’s to always back up important data. Unfortunately, even among sysadmins, this rule is often preached more than it is practiced—backups tend to be slow, cumbersome affairs that are ignored for years until they’re (desperately) needed, by which time it’s often too late to get them right.

Fortunately, backups don’t need to be tedious—and there are plenty of relatively low-cost, consumer-friendly cloud services that make protecting your data easy. The five services we discuss in this article—Carbonite, Arq, iDrive, Spideroak One, and Backblaze—are cloud-based and inexpensive, and they operate seamlessly in the background.