I've been using Carbonite in addition to my local backups to external drives and Carbonite really works great. Carbonite is basically Windows backup software tied to an online automatic backup service that uploads and backups your data over your broadband connection. Your data is encrypted and stored in their remote data center and can be restored using the same broadband connection.
The nice thing about Carbonite is the set-it-and-forget-it nature of the software. Once you decide what items you want to backup, you just forget about Carbonite and it backs up your data. You can back up unlimited amounts of data for $5.00 per month or buy a yearly subscription for $49.00. I purchased a 2 year subscription and just finished up backing over 90 GB to the Carbonite servers. Carbonite typically backs up about 2 GB a day and then slows down to .5GB per day once you have backed up 50GB of data.
The only issue I've seen so far with Carbonite is the lack of Windows Vista support. While Carbonite was backing up my system, I upgraded my box to Windows Vista and Carbonite continued to work. But I am not sure I am going to be able to restore things correctly and it's not Carbonite's fault. It's another stupid thing Microsoft did in Vista where all of the user settings documents were moved from "C:\Documents and settings" to C:\users to make it look more like MAC OSX. My Documents become Documents and My Music became Music. Why – No one knows? I am working with Carbonite support and they hope to have an update to their software for Vista and I hope they have a fix for this issue.
If you are interested in trying Carbonite free for 15 days, click this [link deleted].
