With (finally) DSL access at the office, I'm wondering about folks' opinions of the practicality and reliability of online backup services. I'm aware of a few:

Novastor
@Backup
X-drive

I used @Backup a few years ago when they had a free version for some small amount of data. I remember the software being very nice and intuitive

Also used x-drive when it was free. Advantage of x-drive's technology is that it simply creates another drive letter so you can use regular Windows backup software, scheduling, etc.

Don't know about Novastor.

We're probably talking about no more than 500mb of data (maybe 1 gig).

Is it worth it? Would a USB or Firewire external drive (as ScottC has recommended before) be better? It seems that the pro's of an off-site online backup would be that the backup medium is in fact off-site in case of fire/theft/etc. The downside is that it is offsite One would obviously also want a company that is likely to stay in business (and not quietly fold and take your data with them).

Any ruminations, wisdom, opinions?

There's also connected.com, which is more enterprise level data backup.

I personally don't like online backup. It takes forever to backup the first time, and the continuous backup every time is too long for my tastes.

I back up to networked hard drives, as well as to DVD+R media. That's enough safety for me...

We use LiveVault service at the office, and it works really well. (As far as I know they only sell through resellers now--we go through US DataTrust.) Since I get to play IT guy in addition to my real job, I thought this would be a good idea for us. I couldn't really trust myself to make the proper backups that I should.

It's not really cheap (we pay $295/month for 10 GB), but I've been very happy with it. It keeps things in sync automatically as they change on the server, is Exchange aware, and you can throttle the amount of bandwidth it uses.

If you have any specific questions about it, let me know!

500Mb to 1Gb over a DSL or Cable line will take forvever, you can backup 1Gb onto a portable drive in minutes. I still think that small organisations would be better off with a nice compact drive (or even 2) that they can take off site. Invest in a water/heatproof safe at home and store it there.

If yoy have firewire or fast USB on your machine I would consider just getting another hard drive that runs on one of those and making the backups that way.

If you have a DVD burner then I would also consider that.

Backing up over DSL can take a very long time, especially if your high speed is only for downloads and not uploads. I get a meg for my download speed, but usually about 110k for the upload speed, so for me backing up over my dsl configuration is about twice as fast as dial up. Not a good idea.

You can get an 80 GB USB hard drive (either 1.1 or 2.0) with backup software for $140 at places like computers4sure.com

http://www.computers4sure.com/produc...445107&iid=939

which will be way faster then using the internet, and you control the data, not somebody on the other side of the internet.

We're using Veritas Netbackup Pro on the desktop to a local server and then backing up the server with a DLT drive. The beauty of NB Pro is it handles incrementals very well. It only backs up the pieces of a file that actually change, not the entire file.

This is very useful if, like us, your users have huge pst files that change every day.

Cost was about $200/client + $6k for the server & tape drive. Not the cheapest solution in the world, but, then again, how much is your data worth to you?