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Just to be sure, did you mean ClockworkMod Helium (formerly Carbon), or did you mean Carbonite? I'm guessing Carbonite is responsible for the rename to Helium.

http://www.jimkarpen.com/cloudsecurity.html

They also allow you to manage your own encryption keys

http://www.carbonite.com/online-backup/home/safe-and-secure

For home use, though ... I don't need instant access to my personal backups. Sounds like a nice, cheap option for me.

Hmm... Carbonite is $60 per year per computer. That's $5 per month, so if your HDD is over 500 GB, Carbonite is cheaper. Additionally, it automatically encrypts before sending to their servers, restore is immediate (or nearly so). The only drawback is you have to manually add video files to the backup.

David Friend, the CEO of Carbonite, has commented on this event. Interestingly, his take on what happened differs from what was posted in the linked article from CW. According to Mr. Friend, they use an email forwarding agency/company for communications to their customers. He claims that this company misappropriated their customer email list for their own purposes. I'm not sure who I trust less; the CEO of the company that had the problem or the CW author who is apparently afraid no one else would find his article noteworthy so he posted it himself.

Automatic offsite backup services like Crashplan, Mozy, Carbonite etc ensures your data will survive both media failure, theft and fire. You may also choose to keep a local copy of your media, because downloading hundreds of gigs over the net takes a while. But: I'd first put my money into one of these providers, and if I felt I still have too much money then I'd consider a NAS/Time Capsule kinda solution as a supplement.

And never, ever, ever exclusively store data you care about on DVDs and external hard drives.

For the first time in history, our pictures and videos can live forever - completely without quality degradation. It's amazing. And it's disappointing how few people take opportunity of this.

(Of course, you should take care to double-check your new computer can play back whatever media formats you have used - and convert if necessary. )

True, but Average Joe consumer was not setting up and/or using offsite/online backups. If "any idiot" can do it without much fuss then it's innovative in that they made it digestible to the proletariat.

Posting AC to preserve mods...

Check out Carbonite - been around since 2005. Download the program, install, enter your user name and password. That's it - background, automated, continuous backups of your data to remote servers. And accessing that data means opening your file explorer and browsing the archive - just like it was a local drive. It really is something just about an idiot (and definitely morons and imbeciles) can do.

With so simple it's stupid services like LastPass, I really don't understand how people still can't use unique passwords. For christ's sake, using LastPass is EASIER than using 1 common password, because it auto logs in. I really don't get people. Then again, with so simple it's obvious backup services like Carbonite, you'd think everyone would be backing up, too. Fat chance there.

You should look at the Diaspora project. It's a bit immature now, but shows promise. Also, you could make sure to use something like Carbonite and local backups cycled periodically through a safety-deposit box.

I use Carbonite. Auto backup of all files, decent retrieval capabilities, and unlimited storage (I have 178 GB backed up right now), for $55 per year. It's not a replacement for a full SVN repository and other tools, but a great, automatic/no-worry means to backup everything on my drive (and I back up everything).

I'm guessing this was your idea of a lame joke. Just in case you are actually wondering: http://www.carbonite.com/

There a couple of free and fee based options. http://mozy.com/, http://www.idrive.com/, http://www.sosonlinebackup.com/, http://www.carbonite.com/, https://www.upline.com/plans/index.shtml, and many others including skydrive from Microsoft, which is free, but not strictly an online back, in the sense you need to take an extra step of making a backup locally and posting a copy on skydrive.

I use carbonite to back up my data offsite, i only use it for things i have created (documents and pictures etc) not for all media, its easy to use and gives me peace of mind.

http://www.carbonite.com/

Try it, you might like it!

I use http://www.carbonite.com/ to back up all my machines. It is relatively cheap. Just remember that for "unlimited" one should read "about 50GB". After that the transfer speed becomes so low that it's almost not worth it.

For laptop security we use this: http://www.checkpoint.com/pointsec/ For remote laptop users we schedule a batch file that stops services (if needed) and we use this for backups: http://www.carbonite.com/

I use http://www.carbonite.com/pricing.aspx? very cheap, unlimited storage, and fantastic customer service! (not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer). BTW: if you do sign up, why not use the referral link http://www.carbonite.com/raf/signup.aspx?RAFUserUI D=3557&a=0 :) R

I use http://www.carbonite.com/pricing.aspx? very cheap, unlimited storage, and fantastic customer service! (not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer). BTW: if you do sign up, why not use the referral link http://www.carbonite.com/raf/signup.aspx?RAFUserUI D=3557&a=0 :) R

http://www.carbonite.com/ - Unlimited backup for $5/mo, targetted for the home user
http://www.datadepositbox.com/ - cheap backups for $1/MB/mo, targetted for businesses

I don't know about you, but $1 per megabyte per month is not cheap; that's $1,000 (or $1024 if they consider a gigabyte 1,000 meg) per GB, PER MONTH, and is more than the cost of storing on Floppy Disk!

Presumably you mean $1 per GB per month, which is $12 per MB per year. Right now, 500 MB hard drives retail - that's retail mind you, not wholesale - for around $350. That puts the retail cost of drives at less than $1 per megabyte. Now, presume that you need eight drives to provide quad raid reliability, and eight separate machines cost as much as the drives, plus about $1000 a month in electricity, plus, $2000 a month for the internet connection and co-location charges, so to provide, say twenty terabytes of space, 350*400 (350*5*80)+ (24000*3) (Drives have about a 3-year warranty), means to provide 20TB of space over 3 years means it will cost the provider about $5 per GB over 3 years, to which they will charge $36. Nice work if you can get it.

Recommendation 1
Buy a 500gb drive (or whatever size you think you need) for $350. Buy an external USB hard drive case for about $40. For $390 you now have a 500gb backup drive that you can now just use drag and drop to copy files to or from.

Recommendation 2
Buy a second (used) computer or use a spare if you have one, and have it simply act as a file server, and have it grab new files off other machines on your network. Or set the new machine up with Linux, and install Amanda, an open-source backup utility and have it automatically backup new files.

I work in a call center, and have worked with customers through tragic cases of data loss. It is no different in the home. There are two prime threats to data: hard drive failure, and theft or destruction of the "office" space. The first can be guarded against by making a local copy of the data in any way. The second requires an offsite backup. I have been investigating online backups (which protect against both threats), and have found two that are remarkable:
http://www.carbonite.com/ - Unlimited backup for $5/mo, targetted for the home user
http://www.datadepositbox.com/ - cheap backups for $1/MB/mo, targetted for businesses

Both of these can be fully automated for continuous online backup. Of course, broadband is ideal, but they do work over a dialup, it would just have to be on a lot (overnight?). And no, I have no relationship with these companies. I have tested datadepositbox, and it is amazing, but a little pricier. A friend is trying carbonite, and it looks very promising. I believe both Google and Microsoft are positioning themselves to provide free or very cheap online backup in the future. Keep an eye on this technology.

are you opposed to an internet based solution? i believe this was /.ed recently: http://www.carbonite.com/ unlimited storage for $5 / month. you'll be clogging the internet tubes though...

Pros

1. $5/month for virtually unlimited storage. Seriously!
2. Works without much thought on your part required.
3. Doesn't overwhelm internet connection

Cons

1. Requires Windows.
2. A bit too automated. The geek in you will want for options.
3. Initial backup can take a long time.

Carbonite does a slow-trickle upload of my chosen files and directories when the computer isn't in use. I've uploaded over 50GB in about 4 weeks. I still keep local backups of everything, but it's great to have an offsite option for so cheap.