After waiting a long time for a reasonably priced online backup service, there's an outfit that finally started one. I've been using it for a few months now, and despite some initial hiccups, I'm pretty pleased with it. 2GB of backup is free, or you can get unlimited backup for about $5/month. Their website is http://www.mozy.com

Probably operated by the Dept of Justice and the Hon. Alberto Gonzales .

Enjoy while you can but watch what you back up. hehe

If it's free it must not be worth anything

Seriously, I wouldn't use a service such as that for anything. Just get a couple of USB flash drives for $20-30 each and do you backups that way. Or, get a cheap NAS system for your home network and store hundreds of gigs of data.

Backing up stuff to what amounts to a public site is just asking for trouble.

If Alberto and Co want your files they'll come bust down your door and take your machine. They probably won't bother trying to find out where, or if, you do online backups.

Using flash drives or an extra disk drive is all good until your house is burglarized (or burns down) and your PC (and all your backup gadgets) are gone. Already happened to me once. I prefer offsite storage, thx.

I use Mozy and have been using it for nearly a year. I bought the unlimited backup. I like it a lot and have used the restore. This service was recommended by CNET.

You can worry about security if you like. I hope you don't order anything over the Internet using a credit card.

Well, at least create a singel large tarball of all the data and encrypt it before transfering it to the backup site.

An update for those who were concerned about the legitimacy or integrity of mozy.com - they were recently purchased by EMC Corporation, one of the largest storage providers in the IT industry. That should put to rest any questions about legitimacy.

On the down side - I doubt the buyout bodes well for their future pricing - EMC likes to make money, and lots of it. But there haven't been any immediate changes.

Can anyone who's used mozy comment on their upload throughput? I tried that online backup that AOL was running and it was a joke.

Bendejo, I'm sure YMWV, but I just backed up 341MB of Nikon raw format image files in about 11 minutes. Your initial backup may take a while, but incrementals usually go pretty fast. And you have complete control over which files/directories to back up. There's also a slider control to choose "Faster Computer" vs "Faster Backup".

The free version is *free*, so it doesn't cost much to try it out.

Thanks for the reply.
Actually, I was thinking in terms of a MSWin boot drive image of around 4Gb. I would probably split it to 500Mb chunks.
I'll give it a try when I get settled. And I agree, EMC is going to change it altogether, so I'll wait and see regarding a paid subscription.