Back-Up's

Online back up is such a good idea in principle, but like you I am a bit worried about choosing the right one.  I'll be interested if anyone has any direct experience to share too.

In Australia the upload speeds are so useless online backups in many cases are impracticable.

My current upload speed is 256 Kbit/s (Download speed of 1500 Kbits/s) which means that it would take nearly 10 hours to upload 1GB of data.

I will soon have an upload speed of 1024 Kbit/s (Download speed of  30000 Kbits/s) which, although a 4 fold improvement not much good anyway. Particularly because my new 25GB plan will be counting uploads and downloads.

I may backup some stuff on line, photos mainly which will make a 4th source of backup for them (one being DVD's in desk drawer at work)

I can't see backing up online... Then your data is in someone else's hands and you never know what they're gonna do with it. Despite what they promise.

I bought a 1TB Lacie that I'm gonna backup to very shortly... and I back up my most important files to DVD.

@herne do you find that the 1TB Lacie gets hot.  I have the portable 500Gb which wolly reviewed and mine get so hot that it hurts to pick it up.

@wade I don't leave any of my external HDs on for long periods of time. Once I've backed up, I shut it down. I don't believe that externals need to be running all the time that the computer is running.

Was trying to decide if I wanted to splurge and buy a 1TB Time Capsule.

Yup, my 500GB Lacie gets hot. It's plugged in whenever I have my laptop on my desk, and it's just used for Time Machine.

I have two other pocket sized external drives (one a Western Digital Passport, the other one of those small Lacie Ferrari designed ones) that I alternate my weekly backups on.

The only issue with my backup strategy is that I keep the two weekly backups in my desk drawer, under my computer... no good if it was stolen or if there was a fire, but at least it's good for data corruption/hard drive failure!

As Matt88 said, Aus upload speeds are slow - I get 5000kbs download speed on a good day, but 64-128kbs upload speeds.  I manually back up a few important documents to mobile me, but a full backup isn't practical.  I also share Herne's issue about putting all your data with a random third party online. 

Thanks for the tips guys.  I finally went with Mozy and the only thing which I am backing up to them is my photos and Video which in totoal cuttenly runs about 450Gb.   The Mozy app says it is currently going to take 3 weeks to comeplete the first back up.

I also have a 60GB transfer cap on my Internet account and I couldn't imagine uploading 450 GB of data into "the cloud," it would murder my cap rate. I don't even know offhand how much they charge me for every GB above 60...I think the most I've ever used in a month is 12 GB.