Now that you are satisfied with yourself for having a separate physical backup of your data, you think that you are done. The fact is; you are not. What if something happens to your house or your office? You lose all your data along with the backups that you so meticulously maintain. You need to take your backup off-site. It could be as simple as taking your backup drives to another place.

For example, if you are backing up your home computer/s, take your backup drives to the office for safe keeping and vice versa if you are backing up for office PC. Admittedly this process can and will become tedious but at least you can be certain that your data is safer than having all your “eggs in one basket”, as they say.

On the other hand, there is another solution that does not take manually taking physical drives for a ride. That is what online backup is designed to do. For this last part of backing up, I will be talking about 4 kinds of online backup starting with having your local computer data stored in the cloud (the Internet).

The second is synchronizing your data not only in the cloud but to different computers as well. The third is specifically for backing up photos. The last is backing up your cloud data to a separate place in the cloud. I know that last part is a bit confusing, but bear with me and it will become clear.

There are actually a number of sites that offer backup services to the cloud but two services come to mind, Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com) and Mozy (http://www.mozy.com). Both these sites offer you to store your data to them for either a monthly or annual fee. Both offer similar price packages and unlimited storage. The great thing about both Carbonite and Mozy is that you can try any of them for a month and then see which service best fits your needs.

Unlike Carbonite and Mozy, DropBox (http://dropbox.com), doesn’t just back up files up on the Internet.
What DropBox does is synchronizes your files across as many PCs as you own. It works for all three popular operating systems. So in that sense you already have more than one backup. Your files are also stored on the web so that you can retrieve your files anywhere from any computer with an Internet connection.

And best of all, DropBox is free! Well, at least for 2GBs of storage, although they do offer more storage for a fee. I have been using DropBox since it was still in beta, and to say that I fell in love with it is not an exaggeration.

For backing up photos, photo sharing sites such as Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) and PicasaWeb (http://www.picasaweb.com) not only lets you share your photos to the world, but offer great backup solutions as well.

Flickr is arguably the best known photo-sharing site (maybe after Facebook). Bought and owned by Yahoo! Since 2005, offers free, photo uploads (100Mb per month) and only showing the recent 200 photos in the photostream. You can pay a monthly fee for unlimited uploads, full access to all your photos, and the ability to retrieve larger resolution photos files. They also offer video uploads as well with a limited 2 standard definition videos for free accounts per month.

Picasa, a free photo editing application, was bought by Google a few years ago. This partnership with Google has made it possible for Picasa users to take advantage of Google’s bandwidth to share their photos to the world. Unlike Flickr though, Picasa Web Albums gives you 1GB of storage with unlimited uploads.

You can pay for more storage but unlike Flickr, the more storage you use the more you will have to spend.