Online Storage-----Justcloud??

5thwheeleroldman - I use both a plug in drive like your Iomega and put some things in the cloud. If you have 80 gigs of pictures I would suggest that you keep most of your pictures on a local external drive. Why? With USB 3 the transfer rate is super fast. Many times faster than on line. I would suggest a new external drive. I have two recent Seagates and one Western Digital for my Macbook.

I have used Microsoft's Sky Drive, Google's Drive system, Dropbox, and Ubantu 1. Ubantu 1 just emailed me today to say they were closing down their cloud service. So, IMHO, you should try to stick with a well known large service. Many of these small cloud services will not be here five years from now.

Sky Drive - Works well with simple system to keep files up to date.
Google Drive - I have used this one the longest and it works well. However, pictures storage is a PITA.
Dropbox - very simple. very good.

I also use iPhoto on my Macbook Pro. Apple automatically backs up all pictures I import into iPhoto. This is nice for a look at your pictures on an iPad, but is not intuitive to use at all.

I would go with Dropbox or Microsoft Skydrive. Dropbox works cross platform.

I always have performed a backup on an external HD about once a week until last November when my accounting company strong armed me into signing up for their automatic cloud back up. I always thought it was a good idea but didn't want to spend the money. On March 14th my system crashed with all my business accounting and everything else with it. I can tell you that I will never-ever be without automatic offsite back up again. It saved my butt and now seems like a bargain. Look at it this way, you insure everything that is important to you, consider the auto back up as insurance. When you really need it, you'll think it was a bargain.

I like backups at different levels. An external drive is important. After that, my critical documents are backed up by a Mozy-like service. That way, if I lose everything, I can download data (though it will be time consuming.) Every so often, I burn data to DVD and Blu-Ray media.

rav wrote:
we have been using Carbonite for home and business for years- had two computer crashes and the data recovery (per DW) was easy

After your computer crashes, how do you access your data on-line to restore?

The problem I have with these on-line backup solutions is that when disaster strikes and your hard drive fails, you need to replace the drive, install your OS and all of your Programs first, before you can restore your data. Depending on your connection speed, it could take days for your data to be restored.

I prefer an external drive. I can make a system image of my computer's drive and a bootable recovery CD. In the event my drive fails, I simply replace the drive, boot the recovery CD and recover the OS, Programs and data in one operation that would take hours instead of days to complete.

Of course an external drive isn't a perfect solution either. The external drive can fail or get destroyed in a fire or flood. A complete backup plan would use a combination of both to fully protect your data.

You have to decide how important your data is to you and to what extent you are willing to go to protect it.

I just started a 30-day trial with CrashPlan, they have a family plan that allows unlimited data backup from up to 10 computers. I just started backing up my laptop, the software is reporting it will finish the backup in 7.1 days!

we have been using Carbonite for home and business for years- had two computer crashes and the data recovery (per DW) was easy

Look up Carbonite or Crashplan.

Take a look at Carbonite. Auto backs up all files.