Anyway, that's not what this post is about.  I want to talk quickly about online backup services and who I recommend for homeowners and really small businesses.

Letting the cosmic etherness called the "Cloud" (really it's just lots of computers and storage units out in the Internet, but you know us techies, we like to make up words to confuse everyone else) store your data is a scary thing.  After all, it's your data!!

However, would you rather back it up to a thumb/USB/memory stick drive?  Those things were never made for backups (no matter what the sales guy/gal told you).  They break easily and when that happens, your backup is gone, gone gone.  

How about the external drive you have on your desk right next to your monitor?  Isn't that good enough?  Well, only if it doesn't matter that if your house or business burned down (heaven forbid!), or the water pipe running through the ceiling overhead doesn't burst, or a power surge blows up your computer and the drive (even though the drive and computer are on the same electrical circuit).  If your data isn't that important to you, why did you back it up in the first place?

What I'm getting at here is that whatever untimely demise hits your computer, if the external drive (your one and only backup) is sitting in the same building as your computer, you do run the risk of losing it all at any time.

MBH (my better half) uses Time Machine (on her Mac) to back up to an external drive.  She also uses Mozy to back up to the Internet.  Her data is vital to running her business, and if something happened to our house and her equipment, she can buy a new Mac and be up and running in hours.

I use Carbonite, a very similar service, running it in parallel with my external drives (I have several).  We both feel pretty safe.

Both Carbonite and Mozy use the most current encryption algorithms to make sure your data cannot be hacked.  They have redundant systems to make sure your data is available to you whenever you need to restore it.  Neither of these services is very expensive (about $55/year for plenty of space for most people).

Believe me, if you have 10GB of family photos and something happened to them, your spouse would not be pleased.  Or how about that bootleg recording you made on a small reel-to-reel tape machine of the last Grateful Dead concert with Jerry Garcia at the helm.  How would you feel if the digital recording you dubbed from the tape just before the tape disintegrated was lost forever?  I'm sure no one will mind if you lost all your client's data in a fire, would they?  (Could your business survive such a disaster?)

$55/year is a cheap investment to make sure your data is safe.