Free online backup
Need a free place to backup your files? It’s worth checking out the Windows Live SkyDrive service. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s online drive, offering 25GB of free storage to anyone with a live (or Hotmail) account. But first, a couple quick notes about online "backups".
There are more and more services such as carbonite.com that offer a pay for use personal backup service. Most services start around $50/year and offer "unlimited" backups. Depending on your needs these services can be great because they update automatically on a schedule that you choose. One thing to remember is that most high-speed internet provide great download speeds but pretty miserable upload speeds (this discourages you from running your own server since most internet browsing involves lots of download but little upload. For example, Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner Standard service offers 7Mbps download speeds and only 512Kbps upload speed: 1/14th the download speed, there are 1024Kbs in 1Mbs (also, notice that we are using "little b" instead of "big B" when talking about speeds which means Megabits instead of MegaBytes, there are 8 bits in a byte so bits are much smaller - hence it takes longer than 1 second to download a 7MB file on a 7Mbps connection). All this to say: if you backup 10GB of data it is going to slow your internet connection down to a crawl while you do this, and it will take a long time (you do the math).
If you want to control how much and when you upload (and you have a pretty organized file system where many folders don’t change - ie - organized by year), you may benifit by using something like SkyDrive for online storage. You do have to manually kick off the uploads, but with the help of a tool called Gladinet this is pretty painless. Gladinet offers a way to mount your 25GB of SkyDrive space like it was a local drive. So then you just copy and paste the files that you want backed up to the Gladinet drive. Gladinet also manages the uploads so that you can close the program if you need to use the internet, and then re-open Gladient to resume the upload. For more instructions on how to use Gladinet check this article from LifeHacker.
SkyDrive + Gladinet = free online backup