We have a lot of music. We have managed to rip most of our CDs, and are now buying most of our music online through iTunes and the like.

Our iTunes library has now a whopping 90 GB of music and if you add regular files that are not uploaded to Gmail, we need to back up at least 110 GB worth of data.

Yes, we do have an external hard drive and Apple’s new Leopard OS has an excellent back up facility called Time Machine. It works, but this backup is nothing worth if — God forbid — there should be a fire.

Given our ADSL broadband connection I started to search for online backup solutions. It would be great if we could get the Mac to automatically back up all new files to a remote server, and then forget about it. Whatever happens, we will have a complete copy of all the music and all the images stored away somewhere.

We actually do have a .mac account, that can be used for this purpose, but at least in Europe it is very slow, and it will choke on this amount of data.

I found a large number of seemingly high quality services online, but they all become pretty expensive when you reach the 100GB limit. They are well suited for companies, but not for private homes.

I found one service though, that promises unlimited storage for a reasonable price (USD 4.95 per month) , namely Mozy. Even better, they have a Mac version of the software in beta, and the encryption seems solid.

So we tested it, and it works. Admittedly it took close to three weeks to upload all the data, but now that that is done, further updates are quick.

A pertinent question is: If it takes three weeks to upload 110 GB, won’t it take a similar amount of time to download it?

Well, it is quicker to download that to upload data using ADSL, but still: it is valid question. If there is a disaster, though, you can ask Mozy to snail mail you the backup on DVDs.

To sum up: If you are ready to move over to online backups, Mozy is recommended!