EMC bought Iomega this year. They bought Mozy last year. They are still having a very difficult time integrating them into what has always been an enterprise focused sales organization.

Symantec bought Swapdrive which primarily provides white labeled services to other companies (including Symantec pre-acqusition). Unclear if they will continue to provide the white label services or expand that business line.

To say that HP "launched Upline" is a dramatic overstatement. They bought Opelin, made some pretty flash videos, and opened up a service that immediately crashed and burned. The initial users were shut out when the system became quickly non-responsive and new entrants were not allowed. Tough to recover from such a public failure to launch successfully.

Similarly, the partnership between Box and Dell is a lot smaller than the mention here indicates – they are bundling some free Box service onto Dell minis. They isn't any real integration and it is only on the one product line. Maybe that is because Dell is already selling its own online backup (some think it is actually powered by the abovementioned Swapdrive).

All of this without mentioning any of the key standalone players (Carbonite, ElephantDrive, Ibackup, Xdrive, etc…) or the storage-as-a-service providers (Amazon S3 or, to a lesser extent, Nirvanix).

Sure, HP launched Upline, but anyone who has tried to use the service knows it is a failure. Sorry, but putting a cool looking interface on a program that doesn't scale is a recipe for disaster which is why they had to turn to the service off repeatedly after launch.

Backing up the entire application makes even less sense. If your drive is fried and you manage to reinstall the operating system, the backup of application would do nothing – it just wouldn't work without appropriate registry entries, and if you are not a pro who knows what he is doing – good luck trying to back up and recover Windows registry piece by piece.

Finally, backing up an entire drive image isn't going to do much either – you will need to use identical hardware to recover right. This is tool more appropriate for corporate setups where they have dozens of identically configured computers.

Your best bet for the Windows system would still be the old-fashioned way – know where each(!) application stores its data and ad it to your back up schedule. Don't back up the application itself; instead, backup only once the original application CD or a download, remember to safe the serial number. Don't worry about updates, once you recover the base, you'll update the application on-line. Similarly, don't bother to back up the OS daily – either back up once the install CDs that came with your PC or if you will have to buy a new PC, it will be preinstalled. Again, don't worry about the updates. When the disaster happens, you'll be recovering in the reverse order – first OS, than applications, than data, one piece at a time. The real key is to have a very good and metitious record of what applications are installed and where, and that's where the real problem is.

As far as on a drive or on-line. I don't necessarily see how this combersome process can be easily done on-line. Plus, being conservative in my approach (I'm an IT manager in a financial services firm), leaving my data in someone else's possession does not make me feel comfortable. Besides, with the proliferation of portable hard drives, paying for a drive once is much cheaper than continous payments to on-line provider. And finally, there is no need to waste your broadband – no matter how broad it is, it is not that sufficient to make large backups seemless.

As far as what it backs up – you can check off all the file types you want backed up – example images, docs, etc. But I have the entire drive backed up. the only thing it doesn't back up are programs so you'd have to reinstall. But all the data will be stored.

First the backup should include a disc image of the entire drive being backed up.

Second it needs to be able to make incremental backups of changes to the system on a daily basis, with as little user intervention as possible, running missed backups in the background when the pc is started.

I have been using an Iomega external hard drive for several years with Iomega's Automatic backup for a daily b/up of things like the My Docs files, etc. I also use a program like Drive Image XML once a month to create an disc image.

Now if these two process could be integrated to run seamlessly in the background with as little user intervention as possible, just plug & play, then it would be a simple thing to get every body to back up. Perhaps just a simple scheduling wizard when you first plug in the drive.