Let me tell you from personal experience trying to find the right solution for myself. I was practically swimming in a sea of providers when I began looking. If it wasn't such a big industry you wouldn't see that many competitors. Just take a look at my review of all the a href="http://tomuse.com/ultimate-review-list-of-best-free-online-storage-and-backup-application-services" online storage /a providers I found. I had to create a comparison chart just to sort and filter them all!

Is it getting cloudy in here? The Home Cloud industry will employ all IT Britons and a quarter of India's by the end of the week!

Or, that's a lot of porn to censor.

I've been using Carbonite for a while now and it works great. It took about a week to upload 45 GB but to do that I just left my machine on 24/7 and most of the backup was done at night while I slept.

Knowing that my data, particularly important papers, photos and home videos, are safe no matter what happens to my home or office is worth the small price I pay for this service.

Members here that don't see the necessity of on line backup services have not yet experienced the irrevocable loss of important files.

Ya, uhh.....
Now where can I get a 10gbit Internet 2 connection to transfer all that data in less than a month for under $100?

If I tried to upload the around Terabyte of data I would like to back up. Compost.. Comcast would have an entire herd of cattle. I am not against having an off premise storage place for my personal files, but cost is prohibitive for anything that seems halfway reliable. With the money saved, I also would buy a couple TB of hard drive storage and most likely save up and get a decent RAID 5 capable solution. I saw something on Tom's about a fire resistant and water...um...resistant enclosure with drive. It may not do RAID, but will serve as an extra redundant backup.

In addition to backups on traditional media, and tapes are still the most reliabe ones, I suggest to utilise solutions such as RAID-5. And check your devices for errors! A RAID system may manage to handle a single bad disk, but don't wait to see what happens when the next disk fails.

I also suggest to ENCRYPT all disks, not just important documents. Truecrypt looks like a useful solution. Make no exception, encrypt all data. Besides that this simplifies the handling, it also makes it far more difficult to find sensitive information, assuming a useful cryptographic solution is being use properly.

And instead of high-capacity 9cm disks, pick a few more 7cm ("notebook") disks with less capacity. Noise drops dramatically. The heat load goes donw, too. Less heat from small disks extends the life time of your data. And a good hardware RAID controller easily compensates for the smaller disks' lower transfer rate.

NEVER HAND OVER YOUR DATA TO AN ONLINE BACKUP PROVIDER. NEVER!

I mean, I was well aware of them for some time. Using them just didn't make any sense to me. A year of using a service could buy me a new hard drive that would, well, hopefully last more than a year.

Yes, yes, they offer a never failing backup and all that piece of mind stuff. I just want a place for my pr0n.