I'm diligent with my backups. Probably more so than just about anyone who reads this. I have a constant backup to a 500GB network hard disk via Apple's set-and-forget Time Machine and I do manual monthly backups to a different 1TB drive, snapshots of my entire disk. Insurance.

But my backup strategy has the same limitation of most people's approach: if something happens to my house (a thorough break-in and theft, fire, meteor strike, etc) (alright, the last is less likely than the former!) then I'm hosed. Worst case scenario: Someone rips off my laptop while I'm on a business trip and simultaneously there's a fire and my house burns down. No backups. Nothing. Including the literally tens of thousands of irreplaceable photos of my children and our lives together, as well as my travels, manuscripts for my books, and much more.

The solution is something that wasn't an option even five years ago: a backup into the so-called cloud, where the data all lives in a secure data storage facility. I've looked at options, but with almost 400GB of data in my personal document folder, pictures, movies, etc., the cost was prohibitive. Then a friend mentioned she really liked Backblaze and I saw that they offered unlimited backup space on their cloud servers for $5/mo. That's cheap enough. But does it really work?

I've been a big fan of Time Machine, the backup system on my Mac OS X computer, but sometimes the backup is slow. I use VMware Fusion for some testing and have been recently wondering if that's affecting things adversely?

I have a Mac OS X setup in my office that includes an Apple Time Capsule in the middle of the network, streaming backups of every computer and laptop in our organization. One of the laptops was stolen, however, and I can't figure out how to access the backed up data from it on the device.

I sent my iMac into Apple for service and was rather distressed to get it back with the OS reinstalled and everything else wiped clean! I said "restore from Time Machine", but it never saw my Apple Time Capsule. What's the trick, Dave?

Wondering what to do with that Time Machine application that comes with the new Mac OS X Leopard? Have you thought about plunking $300 on Apple's Time Capsule?
Don't do it: wait until you read this review...

The LaCie Corporation have made hard disks for Macs since the beginning of time. They have a new external disk offering called the Big Disk Extreme 1TB. Let me first say yes, that's 1000 gigabytes of storage! Doubling the offering of Apple's Time Capsule device. At the time of writing this the disk was being sold for $224. That's more than $80 in savings over the Time Capsule and twice the storage too. But is it worth it?

Okay, I bought a new Time Capsule from the Apple Store and it's a great wireless base station but... I want to use it for Time Machine backups too and am a tiny bit lost on how to get that set up. Can you help me out?