Always Remember Family Backups

Agreed 100%, home PC back-ups are not optional in this day and age. Our home computer contains pretty much the entire record of my 2-year-old's life in photo and video. If we lost that to a hard drive crash, I'd never forgive myself (not to mention what my wife would have to say).<p>With software like Time Machine, an on-site backup is nearly automatic, and I've had an archive up and running on a separate server for the past two years. My next step is putting together an off-site backup system, in case of fire, burglary or natural disaster. My plan is to buy a couple of spare drives and leave one at an out-of-state family member's house, rotating them out when we visit for holidays.

Idea for an enterprising entrepreneur: create an app that does a multi-site/format backup. You decide which folders/file-pattern go to the cloud i.e. Dropbox and which go to your external HD. I have almost 300GB of videos and pictures of the kids that I don't want backed up to the cloud (too expensive and too time consuming). However I also have ~500MB of text files, word docs, tax forms (pdf's printed from Turbotax online) that would be perfect to backup to the cloud since that wouldn't take any time at all.<p>Then this software would automate this so that anytime I add new pictures/videos, it would automatically go to the external HD. Anytime I create/update a word doc it automatically gets uploaded/synced to Dropbox. Perhaps the backup software could watch certain folders and automate the backups for me so I don't even have to think about it. Heck I might even pick-up C# and learn me some Windows programming.

My wife and kids all have Dropbox accounts. I spent a little time training them to save everything important to "My Dropbox" instead. Works great for smaller stuff.<p>Maybe Dropbox needs a family plan?

I've been putting off buying a Drobo (with Network share) for Time Machine backups, but as a new father I need to get it ASAP.<p>Besides Drobo, anyone have other suggestions?

Currently I use a BackupPC system on the LAN to do nightly backups of all my systems. My mac mini is backed up automatically via Time Machine as well, and I do a nightly backup of the MacBook with SuperDuper. Setup of rsyncd on the one windows laptop is a bit of a pain, but it works well.<p>My current concern is off-site backups. I have none, and need something. The problem is that I can't backup the BackupPC pool (~700G of backups) and since I'm horrible about determining what to save and throw away I end up keeping everything. I think I'm hosed :)

I just got an Acer Windows Home Server machine. It does complete machine level backups of all the home/office PCs. I found it very easy to set up and has given me piece of mind at last!

I back-up most of my important files as an email attachment.<p>is it just me who does this way?

Thanks for all the advice. I'll look into BackBlaze and a few other suggestions today.