Best Online Backup Service?

[yourbeliefs]

Recently my wife's laptop was stolen by some punks. We have insurance and already got a new laptop so the lost hardware isn't a big deal, but the fact that we lost about 90% of my daughter's baby pictures as well as my wife's work on her thesis was particularly devastating. My wife wanted to get an external HDD, but I figured that wouldn't be particularly effective since that could be stolen and/or fail.

I think an online backup service would be best, but I know very little about them. I keep hearing ads for Carbonite on the radio, but I've found with experience that the company that advertises the most is rarely the one with the best price. Does anyone have any experience with these services and could speak for them? I want one with unlimited storage (or at least 10 GB at a reasonable price), one that doesn't require all the files you want to backup to be in a particular directory, and one that if my laptop was stolen, I could just change the password or something so that the jerk who has the laptop can't do anything to my saved files.

TIA

 

[jpdubose]

I currently use the free level of dropbox (Dropbox - Home - Online backup, file sync and sharing made easy.) but they offer 50GB for $9.99/month and 100GB for $19.99/month.

They have a nice, small client that creates a folder in "Documents" on Windows and in Finder on Mac so that you can save files directly to the service. Files are stored local, but then they upload in the background and then each computer you have the client on downloads the updates the next time it's online. They also have an iPhone/Touch/iPad and Andriod clients and they're working on a Blackberry client.

 

[diogen]

As a from-time-to-time online backup, use a new Google mail account (you can make your PC access the ~7GB as a network drive).
Get 7-zip, encrypt the uploaded files using AES-256 with good passwords and call it a day.

You can create as many accounts as you want. Name appropriately. Baby.<NAME>.Pictures or something...

To make the drive inaccessible to the thief get Win7 Ultimate and use bitlocker.

Diogen.

 

[yourbeliefs]

After doing some research on my own, it's starting to look like SugarSync may be the way to go. It's very much like Dropbox, but has cheaper rates ($4.99 for 30GB versus $9.99 for 50GB.) I especially like that I can access files with my Android, so if I have all my baby photos synced I can pull them down and show people right on my phone, as opposed to just ones I took with it.

 

[mdram]

ghave you looke dinto google docs? 20gb is $5 a year

you can get thrid party tools to sync with it

 

[mike123abc]

I use jungledisk backup for home and office. It is based on a per GB fee. It is stored by amazon.com in multiple data centers. It is 15 cents per Gigabyte stored per month.

 

[parp]

I use BackBlaze for my off-site backup. It's $5 per month per computer--unlimited data, complete automated background backup.