Does anyone use one of the online backup services like Carbonite or Mozy? Do they work well? Is it worth the money? I currently use an external hard drive
Heard about this company yesterday ... 7GB storage for free .. https://online.mimedia.com/www/v1/signup/free/ Haven't checked them out yet tho.
Depending on the amount of data you have to backup, Carbonite or Mozy can take quite some time to get the initial backup completed. After that, it is pretty seamless...."set and forget." If they are "worth it", that depends on the value you place on the data or the time it would take to recreate it should it be lost. An external drive is a good part of an overall backup plan, but you should always have an offsite copy of data that you consider to be critical. You might want to check out Dropbox.com. You can get 2GB free with them and using the basic backup routines included in Windows, you could easily setup a routine that saves to Dropbox (giving you the offsite storage).
I use SugarSync (www.sugarsync.com). It lets you backup and restore from multiple devices, and can also backup pictures on your cell phone. You can access files from your cell phone, website, or any pc with the app. It also lets you easily share files with other people.
We used to use Mozy Pro here at work, but it just got to the point of costing us out the arse with the weekly full back-up and daily differentials. Now we use Iron Mountain as they offere better price/package deals for us. We have about 20 individual pcs that do differential back-ups daily our servers are backed up locally to several NAS devices weekly that Iron Mountain comes out with lock boxes to pick-up and swap out. Once a month we do a full online back-up of our entire system to Iron Mountain's data center. Once again this is a business environment. For home use I have a Seagate 1TB external harddrive that I use to back all the wife's stuff up onto, such as her family photos, receipes, etc.
