My expectations for backup solutions are shaped by spending five years doing IT work. Consequently, a lot the solutions out there for home use seem either inadequate or just plain clunky. I know a lot of photogs use disk arrays of one sort or another, either RAID solutions or the poor man’s solution of just a bunch of external drives. Some folks incorporate DVD backups and even off site storage, but this usually amounts to giving a stack of dvds to the guy across the street or a friend in another state. Although this protects you from a house fire or similar disaster, it’s kind of clumsy and slows access to your backed up data. And lets face it; digital has already turned photographers into lab technicians. Do you really want to become a system admin too? In the enterprise world, data storage and back up now often involves network attached storage - multiple big drive arrays often geographically dispersed and hooked up via high speed network - with a secondary backup of tapes off site. The combination of the two provides you with quick access to backups that are online but offsite as well as distant offsite storage on a completely seperate media. Redundancy and quick access. Network attached storage, or NAS for short, is what I’d like to see come to the home user particuarly internet attached storage. There’s lot of ways to hook all that RAID or even all those external drives up to the home network, which is all well and good for quick access, but it doesn’t protect you from a local disaster. That’s where the internetworked attached storage comes into play. There’s a lot of companies offering online storage, but the cost per gig isn’t reasonable for photographic uses. See this NYT article for providers and prices: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/technology/07basics.html. Apple for example charge $100 a year for a gig of storage. A much cheaper solution is usually available from website hosting companies. I pay godaddy.com $75 a year to host this site and a few others. That gets me 100 gb of disk space, which is way more than I need for hosting this site, and enough transfer to handle all the site requests and access to my backup files. 100 gb isn’t enough for you to backup all your raw files, but it is enough to archives full res low compression jpegs of the selects. That 100gb of storage is always available no matter where I go in the world. In the last week I’ve accessed it from my apartment in Korea, over a wireless network in the Osaka airport and from the pseudo-inlaws house in Iowa. And the hosting company takes care of migrating all that data to new storage media when the old stuff goes belly up. I don’t have to worry about lubricants drying up in a seldom used external drive or about improperly stored DVD’s having data faults. I also don’t need to worry about finding a computer with the right interface to access some obsolete storage media. Ever wondered how you are going to get at your old ATA drives when they stop building ATA controllers? SATA and USB will probably be gone in 10 years. But the network won’t. The only problem? Getting the data there. If you haven’t ever noticed, your dsl or cable connection caps your upload speed at a much lower rate than you get for download. That means uploading 10gb of image files can take days instead of hours. So don’t fall behind. Luckily download speeds are much better.