Humyo Online Backup

The ideal backup software should be as unobtrusive as possible but should spring into life when it’s needed. Humyo is an online-backup service that seems to fit that bill.

The basic Humyo service costs nothing and offers 2GB of online storage space. Useful as this is, it doesn’t give access to Humyo’s best feature, the Smartdrive program that keeps files backed-up automatically. This service costs just under £50 a year and ups the storage to a decent 100GB.

During the installation process it sets up the folders to be backed up, such as documents, photos and music, but these can be changed if your files are kept elsewhere.

The Smartdrive software can be installed on several computers and then gives access through Windows Explorer to files stored online. This is ideal if you have a laptop and want to access files on the move without having to synchronise all your documents.

The only hiccup we had was that the software was automatically set to download all files below a certain size in the background so that they could be accessed offline. This might be a problem on computers with small hard disks. Turning it off was simple, though, and after that only requested folders were copied between Humyo and the computer.

Coincidentally, while reviewing Humyo our test computer had a serious problem and had to be replaced, which was an ideal opportunity to test Humyo for real. As broadband download speeds are faster than uploads, restoring took significantly less time than it did to back up in the first place and everything appeared to have been restored properly.

The only drawback of the process is that the files all appear as though they were created on the day they were restored, not when they were created, making it impossible to sort anything in date order. It did make the computer-replacement process considerably less stressful, however, to know that our files were backed up online.

Peace of mind is what backup is all about, and Humyo certainly delivers when called on in an emergency as well as for day-to-day access.