Opinions?
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We use Carbonite at the office. We had a computer crash at work and I was able to recover a crucial file off of Carbonite's site.

I also use it personally at home.

No problems.
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Steve, for an office or for home use?

Mac / Windows ?
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Opinions - I see no need for on-line providers, as they could be hacked as easily as any other website. I know they say they're safe, etc., but having my hands on my own backup means a lot to me. I use Time Machine with a 1 TB ($75) on my Mac as a backup. It worked great when I bought a new Mac last summer. All my stuff from the old Mac was put on the new computer and I hit the ground running like nothing ever happened. If was as effortless a process as I could imagine.
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That's why I was asking, the Time Machine is great, but sometimes people need it to be online I suppose.
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I'm with you, Brother. Not a huge fan of "cloud" storage.

Time Machine is nice. I leave it on and it does incremental backups every hour. I know some folks who use it but only turn it on every few weeks/months and manually run a backup.

The only "drawback in our approach is that if a disaster (fire, earthquake, flood, etc.) hit or a burglary, an in-hand backup is of little use. I am in the process of manually backing up important docs, pictures, music, and movies to one of my external drives and either giving it to a friend or placing it my safe deposit box. Every month or two, I plan on retrieving it and updating as needed.
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Personal/Windows.

I have a "local" hard back-up, but was thinking more for the "catastrophic" scenario such as fire, burglary or even one of those pesky hurricanes we tend to have around here every once in a while. I'm not so worried about personal stuff that hackers would be interested in as that's pretty slim and is taken care of, but in this digital age, I have a LOT of family pictures that could not be replaced.
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Depending on storage requirements, I would go with a thumb drive or external HD. Manually back things up and take it offsite. I'm not a Windows guy anymore so I can't recommend an automated solution. :-)
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To be honest with you Peter, I'm starting to think about becoming an abacus kind of guy more and more these days...

Last I looked, I'm in the 500gb range. Like I said, I have an external HD that most stuff is in, it would just be nice to know I wouldn't loose pictures, etc. in between.
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I hear great things about Carbonite, but call me old fashioned. I like "local offline" backup because once it's online, it can be "hacked".
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Carbonite for personal use is hard to beat. Very cheap and last I checked unlimited storage. It has a small client you install and it backs up automatically. The first backup takes a while but after that any new files are automatically and instantly pushed to the cloud.

I know many people including family that lost tons of family pictures due to failed external hard drives. I highly recommend a cloud backup tool like Carbonite. No schedules to mess with, no manual backups to run, no forgetting and losing data, no data loss from a cheap hard drive failing.
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I just bought two 13" Windows laptops as my wife and I get ready for retirement and I went with this as a backup option.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...ilpage_o04_s00

The CNET and PC Mag reviews were pretty good, but I haven't had the time to set it up yet. I do like the Time Machine for Mac, but that left when my daughter moved out. :-)
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I bought one of those, Tom.
But I have no intention of using the cloud storage. At least for now.
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