I would like to have researched the pros and cons of online backup and
also getting an auxiliary machine to do back up-- price comparisons of
both.
This is for a law firm -- our current backup servers are about 120 gb
and we back them up daily.  For online storage...i am guessing we will
only use around 1 gb per month.
Thanks.

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Clarification of Question by zrike1-ga on 11 Jun 2005 14:20 PDT

That was very helpful-- although, perhaps I should clarify... Our
backup drives are 120gb, but that is not the daily/monthly amount we
backup, just the size of the drives (they are not even close to being
full).   I am guessing that we wouldn't use more than 1gb per month.  
The files are almost all text..so they really don't take up too much
space, even with 10 attorneys.
Going offsite seems like it would be much safer... but you are right
about the legal ramifications if...god forbid... the outside servers
were hacked... so I think we would definitely want a VERY secure site.
Currently we do not make hardcopies of the backup data... but I really
like the idea of burning a dvd monthly as well.
So what is considered the most secure online backup site?
Thanks again for your help!

If you back up 120gb of data daily to your backup severs, why would
you only use 1gb a month if you back it up online? Sorry, this doesn't
make sense to me.

Here's a few pros and cons

Pros:
Redudancy - if your personal backup servers get fried, building
catches fire, etc. you'll still have all your files somewhere (plus or
minus a few days of data)

You don't have to do it yourself, which can save you a headache.

Most good storage providers make nightly backups, in case anything
goes wrong which gives you another layer of protection

Cons:
Depending on your business connection, can be *very* time consuming.
What is your upload speed?

Sensitive data (which I assume you'll be backing up) should not be
trusted to just anyone. It might be hard to find a trustworthy backup
site that is inexpensive. Also, how do your clients feel about it? Do
you know the legal ramifications of accidently leaking client
information due to your online storage hosting company being hacked?

Bandwith/space is very expensive. If you back up only 120gb a month,
it'll still cost you an arm and a leg.

A solution that isn't costly, and works pretty well, is simply moving
a backup sever offsite. A cheap computer (400mhz, 256mb ram) with an
SATA RAID should service you well, without being inexpensive. I'm sure
you can find someone around town who is trustworthy to rent you a
small amount of space where you can lock up your server and run a
connection to. A personal connection (RoadRunner, for example) would
be fine for this, and cheap, since you only need it to download data,
not upload. You could still make backups nightly to your personal
servers, and have those servers send a backup of that data to the
sever offsite. rsync would be useful for this (assuming you use
linux). Which brings up the question of why these backup servers are
on location: if you need offsite hosting, why not move all these
offsite? It'll be slower to back up files, but safer.

Otherwise, do you make hard copies of this data? Say, burn DVDs of the
backed up files monthly? This would also be a good idea.

Hope this helps

http://www.xdrive.com/
http://www.backup.com
http://www.ibackup.com/ <- Looks to be your best bet.

You might want to look into these three sites. Please read the privacy
policy of each. The prices for 1gb look more than reasonable.

If most of your files are text files, then you're right - it should be
a very small amount of space taken up. Especially if you zip them up.

DVD-Rs are probably not what you want, if you arn't backing up such a
huge amount of data (like I assumed at first). An external CD burner
might be what you want, to save yourself some hassle. The more backups
you make, the better off you'll be. ;)