I do a weekly backup to external hard-drive and then put the drive in a fire-safe. They needn't be that bulky or expensive.

That's worth considering... cheers.

At the local Apple User Group we had a talk on back up methods and there was mention of a company that collects the hard drive from you by a courier motor bike and takes it to a secure location - returning the previous level hard drive. The back up hard drive being created on a frequency the business or user requires.

Sorry I cannot remember the name of the company.

A bit slow really but this is the initial backup, it will be better once that has completed. They have 2 levels of throttling, one kicks in after you have uploaded 32GB and the next level is at 200GB.

a restore can get very expensive!

I think the idea is that online backup is an insurance policy, not a substitute for ext HD storage - so restore shouldn't be an issue in all by the most extreme cases.

Acknowledged, but that doesn't give it any immunity from being costed out and compared with other approaches.

What kind of speeds do you manage through the different stages?

if you ever had to use the backup (probably fairly unlikely) you could download it via someone with an unlimited connection.

not ideal, but cheap

It seems to work in an odd way, sometimes I have seen it max out my upload for a few mins but normally it just sends a short burst of data. if you monitor the network throughput you see a series of spikes varying between 30KB and 100KB. They seem to aim for 2GB per day.

Mozy however, just maxed out the upload at around 140KB/sec and if you started to use the machine the mozy client would reduce its upload so as not to get in the way.

I always factor Sod's Law into these things- if I ever needed to do that, everyone I know with an unlimited connection would just have gone on a fortnight's holiday