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Why not just install a mirroring controller ($85) and a second hard drive ($125) and then have 100% backup locally? Ok, if your house burns down, you're SOL. If your tv antenna gets hit by a bolt of lightning, you might be SOL. If you mung up your registry, you'd have to recover the data files once you re-installed the operating system. I just don't see the gain involved in flying my files across the internet when for $200 I have a real-time, identical backup on-site. You can get somebody to do this for you for less than $100 labor and know that even if one of your drives dies, life goes on - go to CompUSA and buy another drive. Off-site backup makes sense for businesses but ask your "friendly" EMC rep how much he wants to do it for you...

I do my own backup of my machines, to various tape drives. But I have ended up spending alot of time and money on this over the years.

My wife's machine, which she used to track her small business, I have backed up via a web based service. One time, I set it up to know which files and directories to back up - certain accounting, tax and document stuff. Now everyday, without her even knowing, her files are backed up, offsite (far away offsite). Perhaps $20 is deducted from her business account each month. And when the day comes, the files will be there.

It's much like my machines at work. I used to back them up to tape, myself. Now my MIS department backs up thousands of machines to a big monster rig, and when a file is lost, it's there. Once you're working off a high speed connection (a couple hundred kbits at least, most any cable or SDL) always on connection, the entire economics of it change.

I agree totally. If my house burned down, I think I would have a lot more things to worry about than what was on my PC.

I don’t backup over the Internet, because I think it is too expensive. When they can backup all my computers for 5$ a month, I may consider it. I was just explaining the new backup methodologies, given that nobody has been able to break the MD5 hash, and hopefully nobody will.