MiMedia is an online backup and storage service that specializes in letting users secure, enjoy, and share personal digital media such as music, photos, and video. Like Nomadesk (3 stars, $50/year), MiMedia's is more about synced online storage than traditional online backup—new and changed files automatically go up to the cloud—with no scheduling required. Currently there's no Mac software client, but MiMedia states that it will arrive in 2012. Still, MiMedia has many consumer-friendly perks that separate it from the pack.

Pricing

MiMedia serves up a hefty amount of storage. Free account users receive a decent 7GB of storage, but if you opt to pay for additional space MiMedia offers 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB plans starting at $9.99, $20, and $35 per month, respectively. In comparison, our Editors' Choice, SOS Online Backup (4.5 stars, $9.95/month) offers storage capacities ranging from 50GB to 1TB. Carbonite (3 stars, $55/year) and Mozy (3 stars, $54.45/year) take a different approach—unlimited storage covering one machine for about $55 a year. In all, MiMedia's pricing is quite reasonable.

Setup

To start with the free trial account, all you need is an e-mail address—you aren't required to input a credit card number, which simplifies the process. Downloading the software to a computer requires a Windows PC (XP SP2 to Windows 7), 1GB RAM, and 20MB of hard drive space. Once the software's installed, a wizard starts up, asking you to sign up for an account or sign in. Right off the bat, the service gets points for supporting external and network drives, something you also get in SOS, but not in Carbonite. This support is important for those pictures and videos on your mobile phone as well as on a USB stick or camera memory, though MiMedia lacks SugarSync's previous file version saving.

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Next, you wait while MiMedia calculates the amount of storage you'll need for each selected folder or drive. After this, you click Save and select a method by which your data will be copied to MiMedia's servers: Internet or Shuttle Drive. The former lets you backup data via the Web; the latter lets you request a free Shuttle Drive that you can use to mail in your data should the Web process prove too drawn out. One nice thing about this process: you can go back to any Web browser at any time and change the settings for any drive in your account.

There's no scheduling option, as MiMedia works constantly in the background looking for added and updated files in the folders you've specified (or those chosen automatically by the Basic and Recommended choices above.) Because of this, you could consider it a syncing service rather than just online backup. But it's only syncing to the cloud—it doesn't sync among PCs the way SugarSync and DropBox do. MiMedia, however, didn't present any difficulties in adding more PCs the way SugarSync did, and offers a lot more with media display and cloud storage than DropBox's simple synced folders.

Next came MiMedia's special sauce: The Free Shuttle Drive service. Though my backup was only calculated to take 12 hours, I signed up for a disk anyway. At this point, I had to enter a password, full name, and address. If you want a Shuttle Drive, you must also enter credit card info.

The disk arrived with a return USPS postage sticker, and was tied to my account--it won't work outside of the MiMedia context, so don't get any ideas of using it for other purposes. Immediately after I plugged it in, I got a popup message saying "Shuttle Drive Detected." After a Windows security okay, another dialog said, "Your Shuttle Drive is Connected," and offer me a Start button. Within seconds, my 3GB of data was on the drive. A final dialog suggested I plug the drive into the other systems in my account. After that, it was just a matter of dropping the disk in the mail. The disk is secured with AES 256 encryption, while uploads are secured with 128-bit SSL.

For online uploads, there was no way to tell the service to back up a particular file immediately as you can with SOS Online Backup, but an indication in regular Windows Explorer tells you that a folder was included in MiMedia storage. The service only works at the folder level—I couldn't exclude or include particular files. Nor was there a right-click choice to let me quickly add a folder or file, as I could in SOS.