Disk Drives and Backup Solutions (no, no, no... REAL backup solutions that you'll actually use!)

Everyone knows a backup is a must-have these days. We've got more precious moments, priceless artifacts, and important digitized content than ever before. However, the other thing we all know is... we're lazy! Worse than that, we're lazy, and backups take time. That's a killer combo in many cases.

You may be a really smart IT guy and have a great scheduled delta sync that gives you incremental and full images of the various machines in your house, but what about your wife's laptop?

What if you didn't need a local SAN and PHD to configure a holistic, hassle free backup solution for your entire household?

SOLUTIONS!!

1. Backblaze (http://www.backblaze.com/) (This is what I use)
2. Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com) 
3. Mozy (http://mozy.com) (Think dropbox+backup)

Each of these is as simple as:

1. Signup
2. Install the client
3. ... there is no step three! It automatically backs up your computer and keeps it backed up.

What about restoring? Each offers a simple web interface for individual file, folder, or drive restoration. Did you have a 2TB drive that was completely full when it failed? No problem! Backblaze (and I think the others as well) can send you a drive in the mail with all your data (since downloading it is going to take a week...)

Is $60/yr worth it? Yes. It's worth not having to buy an external drive and maintain a regular, regimented sync schedule to the external drive. If you're currently doing this, when was the last time you tried to restore from your solution? You may think everything is over there (and in sync), but the truth is more likely that you're missing critical files, or worse, the external drive you're backing up to is on the verge of failing as well.