I've been using online backup services since 1999. I realized that I had enough data in Quicken that losing it would be a painful experience. I also realized that I wasn't sure if I could trust local backup media, like ZIP disks (back then) and CD-Rs, especially if there was a fire or flood at the house.
I started with backup.com (aka "@Backup"), as it was recommended by Intuit at the time. The fee was $29 per year for 30MB of data backup. In 1999, that was plenty of space for my Quicken files and other documents. I even used the recovery service once to pull down an older version of a file. However, by 2002, I noticed that the client app for backup.com was reporting connection failures to their backup server. Shortly thereafter, I canceled the service, and chose another provider.
I learned a couple of things from the experience. First, online backups can be convenient and unobtrusive. Second, having multiple backup revisions is great, as you can go back in time in case you screw up an important file. Finally, an online backup service needs to be trustworthy and reliable. If they ever show signs of unreliability, grab your data and move on.
After dumping backup.com, I signed up with Connected Backup. I've been using Connected ever since. Connected was recently acquired by Iron Mountain, the big off-site records company. Connected stores numerous revisions of each file for several months, and using their slow but effective client app, you can be very specific about which files to back up and when to do it. I pay $99/year for 500MB of backup space, which is enough to cover my ever expanding Quicken data and documents folder, and I have backups scheduled to run once a day.
However, many new online backup services have appeared recently, promising low prices, tons of backup storage, and real-time backups. Carbonite is the best of the of the bunch. For $49 a year, Carbonite will backup an unlimited amount of data, including your entire computer if you want. Whenever a file changes, it is immediately backed up automatically. A downside is that only the most recent revision of a file is backed up - you can't go back in time like you can with Connected. And a minor irritant is that backup inclusions and exclusions are done via Windows Explorer instead of a central backup application. So if you want to know if a file is going to be backed up, you need to navigate to the file itself in Windows and look for a colored "dot" on the file icon. That all said, I use the Carbonite service in addition to Connected, and love it. The convenience is outstanding. If you don't need to have multiple revisions of files backed up, Carbonite is the online back service to use.
Over the coming year, I anticipate services like Connected and Carbonite to be more competitive with each other. Hopefully, they'll each offer unlimited storage, but with multiple file revisions. If that happens, I'll be able to rely on just one service instead of two. But until then, consider me nicely backed up off-site.
You are a perfect candidate for using Mozy.com. I use both Carbonite and Mozy.com for multiple backup locations, but Mozy has the Iron Mountain features you love PLUS unlimited storage space at $4.95/mo.
You're right, Mozy does cool. I had read a few reviews that criticized the software's stability, which turned me off. But it is worth investigating.
I have been unable to connect to the Carbonite server for 3 days. Tech support has failed to respond to my email. I thought it might be my Zone Alarm firewall, but even with it turned off, I still cannot connect to their server to resume backing up. I already paid for a 1-year subscription; as a result, it appears they are in no rush to resolve my problem.
Ironically, while Carbonite has been working fine for me, Connected has been stalling at the "Waiting for verification" stage almost every day this week. I'm wondering if it is related to anti-virus software, though I don't know why this would be a new problem. It also only seems to happen after I log in to my machine in the morning.
Follow up: My problems with Connected appear to have been a conflict with Nod32. Specifically, if Connected started a backup while Nod32 was loading, the backup wouldn't complete. I just added an "exclusion" for "COBackup.exe" in the Nod32 IMON setup screen, which seems to have fixed the problem.
