I've been doing some more work to establish a backup solution that is easy and cost-effective - and suitable for individuals or small businesses. Key considerations are the limited bandwidth we have in Zimbabwe, balanced against the (low) cost and convenience of outsourcing your data backups.
I'm assuming you're on a broadband solution of some kind. If you're not, slower connections may work, but unless you really have no other option start by upgrading your internet connection. My tests have been done over a WiMAX connection, with an initial upload out of hours.
What I've ended up with:
1. Google Apps Business Edition version of Gmail @ $50 per user per year (or free if you're 10 users or less)
This will provide google-hosted email, which can be used with Outlook Google provides a migration tool which allows your existing exchange and outlook (.pst files) data to be imported into GMail. This includes your email, contacts and calendar.
The Business Edition of Apps provides a 99.9% availability guarantee, plus your data is encrypted, and replicated across multiple sites. In the event of the failure of an entire data centre, recovery / failover is automated, and shouldn't normally be visible to users.
2. Google Docs for backing up data on a per user basis (1 GB free with Google Apps, 20 GB additional storage available @ $5 per year)
Google Docs allows storage of documents. Optionally these can be edited from within the web interface (i.e. if you are away from your own computer, you can not only download your documents, but also edit them in place without MS Office).
3. Syncdocs to automatically synchronise data between your laptop and Google Docs (free)
I'm running this at the moment, and it's working fine. This syncs a single folder, so I've rationalised 'My Documents', and selected that. An initial upload of 500 MB of data has been a weekend's worth of automated uploads. From here on in, only changes / additions will be uploaded. That's likely to be trivial on a day-to-day basis.
Caveat: This solution works really well, and in the developed world I'd backup everything (photos, music etc. as well) to Google Docs (and / or to Picasa - Google's photo storage solution). 80 GB of storage costs only $20 per year, but the upload times will be lengthy. Until we've got multi-MB/s broadband I'll continue to backup my photos to external hard drive.
The big difference this solution makes is there is no other backup in the mix (set up a script that transfers your business data such as Pastel to a folder that's synced, and it'll take care of that as well).
A further advantage of this solutions for me is that I have an android smartphone. So my emails, calendar and documents are not only backed up, but also accessible from my phone anywhere there's Econet service. With Telecel launching their 3G service the same is true for their users as well.
