Backups have been sort of an obsession for me lately. The reasoning is that a 300GB Maxtor external drive I had died recently and nearly took my entire digital legacy including all 13000 or so photos of mine and the like with it. Yikes!

The good news is that I was able to recover the data. The bad news is that I've found online backup solutions to be lacking. So far, Flickr is the only really good backup system because they understand users who want to just dump huge gabs of data and leave it there....Too bad they only cover photos. I'd give my left pinky for a flickr of music and random files)

I've also tried:

Streamload which then became MediaMax - these guys were ok at the beginning, but their service and software since the swtich to MediaMax has been a nightmare. I can't get the MediaMax XL thing to reliably backup my music. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't...some backup solution that is.

Foldershare - this is actually a neat product that Microsoft bought. It's not actually built as backup software, but it can be used in this capacity and helps keep stuff in sync in multiple places. The idea here is that I may use an old PC as a server hooked up to an redundant array of some sort that is foldershare aware and that just sits there collecting my digital life no matter where I am.

Mozy -- Just getting started here, but this looks like a contender for my MediaMax replacement as the cost is low. Also you can get free GBs from there and even more for referring people. I'm starting with the free plan, but hoping that I get enough people to try them out to earn enough gigabytes to house my digital legacy

Anyway, I'm ready to walk and have been exploring other places to keep my 30GBs of music and several gigabyte audiobook collection. Of course, I could always use another backup for my images, but I'm thinking that flickr is as good as it gets (assuming Yahoo doesn't go out of business...let's not go down that rat hole, shall we?). I seriously would like another photo backup however as that is priority one for me. Home videos (especially finished edited products) are also P1. Also P1: my collection of book abstracts and random collection of useful things like DVD rip/backup utilities and the like.

All told I'm looking at about 100GB of backup to be about right for now....that means about $10-15 per month cost. Oh well....that's a small price to pay for protection from the eventual digital demise of my local storage boxes.