There are plenty of solutions for backing up files these days: if you don't like using Windows' own tools, most decent security suites now offer dedicated services of their own. But online backup seems to be the new 'in' thing, saving you room on your hard drive and offering additional peace of mind in that if your local storage becomes corrupted your files are kept in a safe place.

SquirrelSave is a dedicated solution that can manage this for you, and involves downloading a small application before registering an account with the site. Once this is done you'll find that you can access the software via an icon on the system tray, but can alternatively manage most of the features from the right-click menu.

After installation, a dedicated SquirrelSave menu allows you to choose which files to back up, view the current backup set or perform one-off backups of certain files. When you choose files or folders to include, the icon representing them is overlaid with an orange cross, which signifies that an item is included but not yet backed up.

SquirrelSave will work its way through your selection, uploading the files one-by-one to your online storage, and replacing the orange cross with a green tick to show that progress is complete. If you modify a file it'll automatically be re-backed-up at the earliest convenience, and in the case of larger files, only modifications will be updated, saving on bandwidth and processing time.

If you make a change to a file and later want to revert back to a previous version, you'll find that the software keeps track of older versions of files right back to the original backup, allowing you to choose a time-frame from which to restore. This is done by browsing the current backup drive, which is represented in a Windows Explorer style interface, and choosing to drag and drop or copy and paste from the original file structure to a suitable place on your local drive.

You're provided with unlimited storage for the £4.95 per month fee, and while this may sound like a lot compared to a one-off payment for a dedicated solution, we were pretty impressed by how well the software worked.

Backup times are obviously reliant on the upload speed of your connection. In our tests on an 8MB line we uploaded a range of files and saw an average time that equated to about 2 minutes for every 10MB of data. This makes it pretty adept at uploading and updating smaller files like documents and spreadsheets, and capable enough at handling digital media.

Company: SquirrelSave

Contact: 0845 890 3300

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