backup hard drive

[jd-science.livejournal.com]

i recall reading an article some time ago about services that will automatically backup your hard drive and store the data offsite for some small monthly fee. however, i no longer remember the names of these services, and Google doesn't tell me who's reliable and who's scammy. any ideas?

in addition, i'd like to buy an external hard drive and just have another copy on-hand. any advice on that?

thanks, davis square livejournal!

Comments

[bettyw.livejournal.com]

My work uses this software (http://onlinebackup.connected.com/) happily, but we've not used Iron Mountain to administer it. Looks like their service is affordable for an individual, though (Starting @ $10/mo and up depending on the amount of data).

[xuth.livejournal.com]

My suggestion is to buy a pair of adequately large hard drives (I recently bought a few seagate 400gb drives for $89/per with free shipping at frys.com) and get two USB or firewire enclosures for them (at microcenter they're close to $30/per, online you can find them for $15 or less). On a regular basis (at least weekly), wipe one and copy your local drive to it and take it to work or a friends house and take the other one home. This way you always have a backup at home (for if you accidentally delete something for example) and an offsite backup (in case you lose the contents of your house).

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

Err, I'm not sure it's /quite/ what you're looking for, and it's not particularly polished, but Amazon will store arbitrary amounts of data for you at reasonable prices. There's a service built on top of it called JungleDisk (http://www.jungledisk.com/?) -- I haven't used either it or Amazon's S3 service, I know other people who've been very happy with Amazon S3.

[phoenixy.livejournal.com]

I've heard good things about Carbonite ($5/mo, 15 day free trial) as an online automatic backup service. My boyfriend recently started using it and is happy with it.