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I am behind a firewall. I have an outbound proxy server, and run anti-virus, anti-spyware, local firewall and registry cleaner on a regular basis. My work machine is linux and my home machine vista.

Then again, I’m in the computer security business and a tad paranoid. But I have never had a serious virus and only some minor spyware.

I'm not in the security business, I repair 'em for a living, both hardware and software. I primarily work on CNC machines for a gubmint military contractor, I do however keep my own units running.

I have not found an antivirus software yet that didn't slow down the machine it was supposed to protect. Anyone writing software to function as maleware, or destructive entities knows there are certain aspects of the antiviral software that they must deal with up front in order to gain access. Most anti-V software is known to have a "footprint" that is unmistakeable. Kind of like a big red flag waving in the wind.

I’m in IT also. Not to target Carbonite directly but all these online storage solutions sound wonderful until one is faced with the very real possibility of needing to recover data without having Internet access. What then? What if malware has disabled IP functionality and/or trashed the OS? It’s fair to say that many of those who have ‘irreplaceable’ data are also frequent business travelers and attempting to restore data whilst ‘on the road’ or when dealing with a failing hard disk is quite a challenge.

As John Dvorak and others have noted even the most casual users are filling drives with 250 GB, 500 GB, even 1 TB capacities due to increased file sizes (photo resolution etc.) and general apathy/ignorance where archiving is concerned. Backing up a subset of those files and/or employing an incremental backup scheme still means a ton of data is going up the wire and in the event of catastrophic failure all that data has to come back down the wire.

I am amused by Rush’s occasional claims that he hasn’t increased the length or frequency of his commercial breaks. Strictly speaking he’s right but even he is not immune from the economy so he’s doing more Paul Harvey-style live commercials for Carbonite et al. Unlike his usual smooth transitions the live spots are jarringly abrupt and it’s a shame that he relies on the old Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt model that IT types are so familiar with.