1. Eliminate your headache and your repetitive work. How many hour you waste for backup solution each month? It’s a big cost.

2. Secure your data from fire, earthquake, thief, lost, etc. (how easy you lost your USB Thumbdrive?)

3. Some vendor such as Mozy support by big name (EMC). So you know your data safe with reliable vendor which have good potential to survive in long term.

The major downside for online backup is it slow at start, especially if your data is huge.

“Is it perfect? No. Does it stand a much better chance of keeping that data alive through a catastrophic event? Absolutely”

we take a full backup every working day, then we put it in a fire proof safe and get the yesterday’s tape and send it to the IT-department in a sister company which has other building in the same city.

if a disaster happens we-at least- got the yesterdays work backup.

James

I have always had concerns about online backup services. There have been several recently that have announced that they will shut down, including HP Upline.

So I guess one issue is that you never know when the service is going to be discontinued, which I guess is not terrible (I am assuming they will offer you plenty of time to go get your data before they close).

My other issue is that you are entrusting your data to someone else, and for the most part, in a format that is easily readable.

Now I am aware of all the disclaimers, and privacy agreements and policies, but I am also very well aware of human nature. After all there are people that manage these services, and they will be tempted, just to maybe take a peek (best case scenario), or to maybe go all out and harvest identity information, and sell it off on the black market (worst case scenario).

I’m sure everyone here has read all about the Geek Squad, and their penchant for ummm, rifling through customer’s data.

Now add to that the fact that I know how easy it would be to write some scripts to look for file names that might contain passwords and such, and then copy that data off to a USB HDD, and it quickly becomes a risk that I personally am not comfortable taking.

Backup is all about mitigating risk to begin with. If you are comfortable taking the risk that some bored technician at the service company may look through your data, then it is just not a factor for you.

Personally I will not allow my data to be placed anywhere outside of my direct control without it being fully encrypted (I’m talking 128 bit AES at least).

Now if we are just talking things like digital pictures of your family, it might make sense to have that stored somewhere in the cloud.

Kerry