In iDrive, one menu reads Backup-Restore and contains two menu items--Backup and Restore. Clicking on buttons in the main window might change the display or bring up an informational message with no options. Jungle Disk, with the most fine-grained settings, has well-written explanations, but a design entirely its own.

Although we don't look for "pretty" in a program, we do value how quickly we can recognize and perform a task, how accurately that task is carried out, and how well we can repeat a task without having to relearn new behavior. CrashPlan, Backblaze, and Carbonite succeed best at hiding complexity behind a simple interface (although Backblaze and Carbonite have other significant limitations).

The biggest difference among all the hosted backup services is how you select files. Each program has its own rather distinct method for choosing files; most also offer a way to exclude files.

The most obvious starting point is selecting hard drives and flash drives. All of the services we looked at let you select any locally connected drive.