Well, I've gotten over the psychological resistance of accepting that Online Backup may be a very useful and worthwhile service to have, as well as a means of secondary backup to my physical backup drive.

Wondering if anyone out there has experiences with this and recommendations?

Ideally, I would like this could be something I could use to eliminate carrying media (or maybe even my whole laptop) when traveling - just backup what I need and restore it at my final destination. (thus, I'd need the ability to be able to backup/restore on more than one computer)

I both use and recommend Mozy Backup - www.mozy.com. They were aquired by EMC not to long ago and I think the support has gotten better although they have changed their pricing/offerings somewhat. There is a free version and the home version works for my needs.

Thanks for the tip!

I've emailed them to find out if i will be able to back up multiple computers and restore at a remote location. It's not clear from the website whether this is possible. If it is, this service sounds perfect.

You can backup multiple computers but each computer has its own account and restore points.

I have restored from my backup once or twice but can't remember exactly how it worked. I do know that when the file(s) to be restored were small enough they zip them up for you. I just can remember if they emailed me the zip or a link to to the zip. You can restore the zip on any machine you want.

Another vote for Mozy - I use it and recommend it to friends. I pay for the unlimited version and it backs up about 100gb off my desktop. You can restore pretty easily and if you need to restore a huge amount of data that isn't reasonable to download, you can order DVD media of your files.

Totally painless setup. Runs in your system tray and backs up your machine when it is idle.

I've been using Connected Online (now part of Iron Mt) for almost 10 years now. Twice I've had catastrophic problems and they saved me -- Once I got my computer functioning, I was able to do an online restore of what I needed right away and in a day (once was two because my problem happened late in the day) I had CDs/DVDs of my complete backup. There was a charge for this, but not unreasonable.

I've often used it to get a older version of something I totally mucked up

Another Mozy supporter here. Had it for awhile and then dropped it because service on my MacBookPro was less than desirable. Convinced to try it again and works very well now with my Mac.

Thanks for all the comments and tips!

I actually did sign up for Mozy online for the free version (why not give it a try, so I guess this marketing hook worked on me) and it was surpisingly painless. I'll probably go for the paid version after I evaluate it for a while.

The only thing I don't like so far is that the backup application doesn't allow you to shut it down by right-clicking on the icon or even as a start menu option - so it keeps running in the background taking up resources whether you want it to or not. It seems the only way to shut it down is to stop the process from the task manager. I guess that will be another question for the CS line.

I did a bit of research when I was trying to get an off site backup up and running... in true nerd fashion I ended up building my own via a VPN connection to a server at our other house... nevertheless, there are some great options out there.

There was something about mozy that just kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I hear good things, but I'm not 100% sure I trust their security.

An option I really liked was Amazon's S3 storage and an application called Jungle Disk (http://www.jungledisk.com/ )... its a two part solution where you get an S3 account that charges based on the amount stored and your monthly transactions (there is a chart on the JD site above that shows examples) but for most folks it should be less than $10/month. Jungle disk takes care of the backups and encrypts them as it goes so you know your data is safe, even on Amazon's servers.

I am curious - what was it about Mozy that made you question the security?

Anyway, JungleBook/S3 also sounds like an intriguing option, and more than likely, fairly cheap, too. Thanks for the tip. ^

Edited to add: In case anyone was wondering, it is not possible to shut down the Mozy Backup application from within the application. Just got the confirmation for Mozy CS, who said that the application is intended to provide "automatic backup". Well, if you are like me and have a couple of older computers, resources are precious! It seems silly to me that you need to have an app running 100% of the time if you only use it for a couple of hours each week.

If you care, you will have to do what I do, and use Task Manager to shut down the application manually.

I tried Carbonite and was rather displeased. Among other things, it took forever to upload despite the fact that I had plenty of upstream bandwidth. I think they were limiting the connection speed, though they would not admit it. Their support department was far from technical.

Does the Suspend option on the task bar not do what you want done. I know it won't fully unload the application, but it does stop it from taking CPU ticks. That's what I do on some of my older machines when I only want occasional backups.

double post

i use xdrive.com

With the multi-page thread about backup freestanding hard drives, and now a thread about backup software, I was wondering if anyone had experience or suggestions regarding online backup services such as Carbonite offered through Circuit City. Unlimited storage for $49 a year.