IN MY EARLIER POST on data backups for non-techies, I asked people for their experience with online backup programs. People were generally pretty happy.

Carbonite, JungleDisk, and Mozy all got good reviews from InstaPundit readers. (Somehow, I’d managed not to even hear about JungleDisk.) And reader Bo McIlvain makes a good point:

As an IT professional, I have wrestled with backup for my tiny home office and network for many years, and in my opinion on-line backups are THE answer because they actually get your data offsite, which is one of the main reasons to back up. The worst and most likely disaster any of us face is a fire which physically destroys the location of your computer. For most, who back up to tape or CD, this would destroy the backup also unless you take your backups to your safe-deposit box occasionally – something of a pain.

The main problem with online backups is the slow bandwidth most people have available so that first backup can take an impossibly long time. I have Verizon’s FIOS service, and find I can back up about 10 gigs of data in a day. I use the IDrive-E service, which sells 150 GB of storage for $4.00/month, which beats the heck out of media costs for tape or DVD. They offer encrypted storage for your files which I guess is fine, but since I’m an untrusting sod (privacy only exists in the absence of court orders), I use Winzip to zip up a Windows Backup file and use 256 bit encryption of my own. Further, since IDrive-E is selling uncompressed space which they certainly compress to their advantage, I send them only compressed data and get more for my money.

This approach is not for your typical user, but computer geeks can get a great deal this way. For the non-technical, the service will back up your data on a file-by-file basis, and every time you get on line the service checks to see if you’ve modified your files and backs them up automatically if you want. My only problem with that is that they certainly keep a private key to your encrypted files, and I’m not willing to give that up.

The advantage of offsite backups is, as noted, that your data stay safe when bad things happen to your “site.” The disadvantage is bandwidth, and the fact that your giving somebody else custody of your data. Meanwhile, here’s more advice from Donald Sensing. And Kingsley Browne emails:

Prompted by the same radio advertisements you mentioned, I have used the Carbonite backup system. I have never had to restore from it, although I have tested it, and the files I restored were just fine.

Carbonite is limited to backing up internal hard drives. I initially had signed up for a free trial and then discovered this fact. At the time, the bulk of my files (which are mostly photographs) were stored on external drives. So, I canceled the Carbonite. I got a new computer a few months ago that has a 1 TB hard drive and decided it was time to give Carbonite a try.

If you want to use Carbonite to back up a lot of data, you need patience. They say that the first back-up can take a few days (but that restoring is much faster). I was backing up about 350 GB of files, and it took over two months. I had other back-up, so this was not a problem. It works in the background and never seems to slow the computer down. It then automatically keeps the back-up current (keeping deleted files and older versions of files for a while in case you discover that you need them).

For the $50 or so per year that it costs, I think it is a good value for “belt and suspenders” types. (I have external hard drives backing up my internal hard drives — one set of drives attached to my computer, and another set stored off-site). I don’t claim that my pictures are objectively worth all this back-up effort, but they are important to me.

And that’s what matters.