[Yokohama]

I intend to purchase an online backup service soon, but would like to get some experienced users' feedback on their experiences. I don't have an enormous amount to back up: around 60 gigs. I see Dollydrive is offering a discount at the moment, though its overall pricing looks relatively expensive compared to Carbonite. But maybe DD's ease-of-use makes the extra worth paying? I haven't looked into any other services yet.

[turtle777]

Just stay away from Mozy. Their client is a hog. It caused all kinds of problems for me.

-t

[besson3c]

60 gigs is not enormous when you are talking about local storage, but it will be an enormous amount of data to upload unless your internet connection upload speeds are much faster than average North American speeds. If this 60 gigabytes will be constantly changing (say, including VM images that you count on backing up) and you don't have that upload bandwidth, I would probably discourage online backup. There may be times where you don't stay online long enough to complete a backup and it could become a major PITA having your overall bandwidth saturated (you might notice playing of internet videos and stuff stalling, for instance). Then again, if you're living in Japan your upload speeds are probably much better than those in North America so maybe none of this applies.

If bandwidth is an issue, I might encourage more of a hybrid solution: some sort of local/network backup for your mp3s and large files that don't change much, and an online backup system for your most frequently modified documents and stuff. If this approach sounds sensible to you, perhaps iCloud would be a possibility?

[subego]

I've been happy with both Carbonite and Crashplan. Though with such cheap services, you get lousy customer service. There's pretty much no way around that.

Crashplan offers more (specifically, backing up of attached or network drives), but I'm a little leery of how long they can maintain the business model. I have about 300GB on Carbonite, and over a terabyte on Crashplan. I'm paying them about the same.

[Big Mac]

Hey besson, is there a technical reason why US broadband lags behind many other Western countries? Or is it just our broadband providers being greedy/lazy?

[subego]

Wild guess: we don't have the same government subsidized infrastructure.

If you have infrastructure available, then the greed kicks in. I get 30 down and 10 up but I pay through the frigging nose.

[art_director]

Back in March I researched this exact buying decision. After much exploration I determined Livedrive was the best thing for me. They offer unlimited storage for as little as $7.95 / month. Their Mac client is in beta but it's worked perfectly for me. And boy is it fast. Maybe give them a look.