Granted, depending on it solely is risky and not encrypting data before uploading is even riskier. I don't fully trust free sites since they have been know to disappear with little or no warning although some are more likely to be more reliable than others. Still, cloud storage has worthwhile uses. It's a quick and fairly easy way to have an offsite backup and is fairly safe if a reliable site is used, it is used in conjunction with a duplicate onsite backup, and any data that needs to be kept private is encrypted before uploading. For small companies, a cloud backup scheme can be less expensive than purchasing and maintaining their own servers and can be reliable as long as the backup site maintains redundant data on multiple servers separated by large distances. Such a back up scheme can be doing continuous backups to minimize any data loss due to power or equipment failures. Such a scheme would be superior to taking a HDD home every night.
For only a hair less the five shekels a month for one computer, Carbonite will continuously backup unlimited data to their servers, encrypting the data before uploading it. The chief advantages are the backups are going to be more up to date than most offsite backup schemes because the backups are continuous and no user intervention is needed meaning the backups are more likely to happen. The downside with the $5/month plan is, unlike Carbonite's business plans, no redundancy is used and it is possible data could be lost if a server takes a total dump (unlikely but still possible). ISPs with a small data cap could have that cap exceeded. Also, total data retrieval would be painfully slow. The latter is a minor problem if one maintains both local and offsite backups and use Carbonite to retrieve the most recent data that the other backups are missing. Redundancy is vital for backups as is having offsite and onsite backups and the right cloud sites with the proper backup scheme can be very valuable.
