What company do you recommend for backing up a small companies
computer files. We are looking for a company that is safe and solid
and located outside of earthquake country (california). We want to pay
as little as possible and have found that they are quite expensive and
the space storage keeps growing. We want to be able to do it
automatically daily or weekly.

If you're looking to store less than 10GB of data, I would suggest a
simple web hosting service -- you could easily write (or have written)
a script which backs up files to the hosting service's computer.  It
would be pretty cheap and easy to setup and use.

If you're looking for significantly more storage space than this, let me know.

If you are having a nice internet connection I would suggest you to
use a online backup mechanism where your data is stored on a remote
internet location.
This makes them accessible whenever u need them and your data would be
kept safe at data centres so you would always get it back in case of
any unforseen calamity.

www.xdrive.com is one of the oldest players in the online backup
technology and very cost effective too.

Their shell extension plugin makes u a virtual drive. So backup up to
your online storage space is as simple as copying to a new drive which
comes in your MY COMPUTER.

On top of all this you could use any software to automate copying of
your data to this online drive to make it automated.

For automated data backup i would recomment NTI Backup NOW.
http://www.ntius.com is their website. Their software gives ability to
do perform incremental backups so that only changed files are only
backed up and not the whole file list.

If it's less than 10Gb or around that figure, you might as well back
up your data on DVD's. A double layer DVD holds about 8.5Gb. You can
use multiple recorders at the same time to burn data with Nero Burning
software. Then you can just mail the DVDs to a post office box that
you have set up outside earthquake country. This is probably the
cheapest option. If you use DVD/RW, you can retrive your DVDs and
rewrite them.

Keep in mind that any online storage option is going to use a lot of
bandwidth. If you can upload 1Mb/sec, it's going to take you around 3
hours to back up 10Gb, and it will saturate your upstream connection.
As a precaution, you can put 2 hard drives in each computer in a RAID
formation, or have the entire master drive backed up to the backup
drive every night.

Hi there, a few questions...  what kind of data are you going to
back-up?  Iss it just flat files, or are you backing up dbase info? Is
there a mail server that needs to be backup up? Do you want to use a
GFS system (grandfather-father-son) system?  Do you need incremental,
differential backups daily? And what kind of budget are we talking
about here?

buy an external usb hard-drive   you could get up to a
quarter-terabyte for a couple hundred bucks or less   back up to that 
 through it in a fire proof safe.   Backed-up and secured for ever.

Yes, external hard drive sounds good also, altough I would use a SATA
or SCSI interface, much faster.

Hi
Here at www.centralmaine.com we use a Maxtor one touch hard drive 160
Gig I think. I find this to be the best. I think it cost around $200
or less and you literally push a button and it backs up your whole c
drive. the first time takes 20 minutes to half hour, but after that it
just updates anything that's changed so it only takes 2-4 minutes.