Off site data backup

Also remember that the cloud isn't the only form of offsite storage.  Long before the cloud we backed up to tapes and had an offsite rotation of tapes.  As connollyg points out, the cloud can be extremely slow for restores, possibly slower than is acceptable for many businesses.  It's OK if you just want to make sure your priceless photos aren't lost, but it could actually take days/weeks to do a complete restore over an Internet connection when terabytes of data are involved, as would be the case for most businesses.  There's also the issue of security and legality.  Anything stored on a third party server is no longer considered private insofar as legal access to information is concerned.  A plantiff in a lawsuit could, for example, have an attorney subpoena backed up files.  Most providers will comply with a subpoena, while an actual search warrant (much higher standard and must go through a judge) would generally be required to obtain data from privately housed servers.

There is also the idea of setting up your own offsite storage to accept backups (private clouds).  These remain private and are more secure insofar as storage access is concerned.  In short, there are many options, of which cloud storage like Mozy or Carbonite are just a couple.  Business requirements should be closely scrutinized before making a decision.

Thanks guys, this is indeed a great deal of knowledge here.
We will have a tape backup in house as well as this cloud backup, we will use the cloud backup to restore only when we have a serious disaster other wise for regular restores we will still use tapes.


And our data is mostly user files and basic security is good for us and we are not very much worried about the data security.

I will consider all the option suggested.
Mozy
Carbonite
Intronis
and
Cloudberry (I will start with this as its on s3 and that am sure is a cheaper option available)

Thanks again

Raj

Excellent input thanks again to all