Over the years, many people have asked me about backup for home machines. Burning files to DVDs and carry them to a different location is problematic. It's a lot of trouble to make frequent offsite backups. I recently did some research and decided on using a program called Duplicati for backup and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for storage. I think having the backup program and the storage separate is the best solution. I can even back up to multiple providers in case one of them just goes away without warning.
Duplicati is free and open source and runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS. It has a nice GUI interface plus a rich command line. Duplicati has built-in AES-256 encryption, which means you hold the key and your backups are encrypted before leaving your network. It creates normal zip files and then encrypts them with AES Crypt, so even if Duplicati breaks, you can still download, decrypt, and unzip your backups using other standard tools. [more]
Duplicati will back up to many different cloud providers (Amazon S3, Rackspace, Google Docs, SkyDrive, Tahoe-LAFS, WEBDAV, FTP, SSH) as well as file based locations.
I chose Amazon S3 for storage because of the history of reliability of Amazon. The cost if not much either. You get 5 GB free, and then it’s 12.5¢/GB/month after that. So you can store 50GB for less than $6/month. It is even cheaper if you choose the Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS).
Get Duplicati here http://www.duplicati.com/.
Sign up for Amazon S3 storage here http://aws.amazon.com/.