On-Line backup is OK if you can afford the large bills from your Internet Provider. In Canada they are moving towards usage based charging. The more GB of traffic uploaded and downloaded the greater the cost to the user.
I have a 1TB fixed drive (purchased for only $70), and I do a complete image of my computer fixed drives (one Linux desktop machine and one Vista laptop) every month, and also store important data in between. (I also backup the Registry quite often - like after software additions and changes). I use the free PING imaging software (downloaded then burned onto a CD - under 700 MB) for saving a complete image and restoring. It has worked great for 4 years now with no problems. With PING I can move a complete operating system to ANY machine I want to or even to several machines.
I used to save everything to 8 and 16 GiB flash memory cards or USB sticks. Now the 1 Tera Byte fixed drive takes care of everything.
So - for those of you who do not wish to run up your internet bandwidth usage bill, you can do as I have done and at no expense other than the initial purchase of a USB plug-in fixed drive or a high capacity flash memory.
Cheers
