Okay, you know you need to back up your data.  You've heard the horror stories of people losing their precious life's work when a hard drive crashes, but you still haven't taken the leap.  Well now my friend I have a solution for you, and it may not even cost you a dime!

I've been researching online backup solutions for numerous customers, and have finally settled on iDrive.  It has a very simple, easy to understand interface, at a very cost effective price.  On the consumer end, you can go with free (you like free don't you?), or $4.95 a month.  What's the difference?  Well, the free account limits you to 2GB (that's gigabyte), whereas the $4.95 a month plan opens the floodgate with 150GB of storage.  You also get a total of thirty archived versions of your data that doesn't subtract from your 2GB or 150GB limit.  Not bad huh?

iDrive works on both Mac and PC, and is one of the only solutions I've found that will actually work when installed on Windows Server 2003.   Installation takes a matter of minutes, then your initial backup (the longest one), will begin.  I had a total of 16GB of data I wanted to back up, mostly pictures, videos, and documents.  Based on my ISP's (Comcast) upload speed (between 800-100kb per sec.), total time to backup was about 35 hours.  From this point forward I have it set up to backup every morning at 3 a.m., and should only take a fraction of the time, because it checks the files and folders, and only backs up that which has changed (incrimental backup).

Restoring data is as easy with a drag & drop interface, and may be done from a different computer.  So if you're visiting Aunt Kathy and want to give her some photos of precious baby Grace, just log in on her computer, and drag them to her My Photos folder.

Continuous backup is a strength, with iDrive spotting and uploading changed files within ten minutes of alteration (and sometimes within four). Files are protected by 128-bit SSL during transfer and 256-bit AES in storage, held and mirrored at a secure fire- and earthquake-proof UK datacenter. Pro users also have their data mirrored at another location, and a user-defined key can be set.

A few other things.  Got a question?  Call them and connect to a customers service or technical support person within seconds, at no additional charge.  You can creat scheduled backups, or allow the service to backup continually in the background, whenever your PC or Mac is idle.

Since I'm going to have so much room left, I may just go ahead some weekend (soon) and backup my entire music collection I've already ripped (copied) to my computer.  I guess that's cool, it's just another 30GB.  Now what will I do with the rest of that room?  Hmmm...