The one thing that everyone seems to forget about is restoration after a disaster. If you've got a small quantity of data, there's no real problem, because you just copy it back over the network. However, if you've got a growing data set that could ever get pretty large, the amount of time (and possibly traffic costs) required to copy all of that data back onto your live setup to restore operation is likely to be prohibitive.
Remember that you can't generally start copying all your data back until your storage infrastructure is in place, so you can't easily parallelise the data copying and hardware setup. It's a big problem that not enough people think about.
For actual service recommendations, for a local desktop, there are things like Jungledisk (Syncs a directory with an online version hosted using Amazon's S3) or Dropbox (Same thing, flat rate for storage, no bandwidth costs), or roll your own service using some kind of NAS hosting, like The Planet's new cloud storage platform.
Personally I sync stuff to dropbox, which syncs back to my laptop, work desktop and home machines, but I wouldn't want to use that for big corporate security sensitive stuff.
The one thing that everyone seems to forget about is restoration after a disaster. If you've got a small quantity of data, there's no real problem, because you just copy it back over the network. However, if you've got a growing data set that could ever get pretty large, the amount of time (and possibly traffic costs) required to copy all of that data back onto your live setup to restore operation is likely to be prohibitive.
Remember that you can't generally start copying all your data back until your storage infrastructure is in place, so you can't easily parallelise the data copying and hardware setup. It's a big problem that not enough people think about.
Here's a few pointers that I'd be looking for:
For actual service recommendations, for a local desktop, there are things like Jungledisk (Syncs a directory with an online version hosted using Amazon's S3) or Dropbox (Same thing, flat rate for storage, no bandwidth costs), or roll your own service using some kind of NAS hosting, like The Planet's new cloud storage platform.
Personally I sync stuff to dropbox, which syncs back to my laptop, work desktop and home machines, but I wouldn't want to use that for big corporate security sensitive stuff.