Data protection for online apps

Chris Gilmer of Web Worker Daily poses an interesting question: "...what happens when disaster strikes?". I am not sure of the answer. Even at the office when then servers or the network goes down work comes to standstill. Most of the data I manipulate, either via a web or rich client application, is located remotely. I have started thinking about the questions and logistics of working offline and though not perfect I do have a solution at least for data that can move ( e.g. text documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc). At home I have been using a home built network attached storage system (FreeNAS) to synchronize my local data to remote storage. The downside is increased storage requirements and increased network bandwidth but so far it has worked well for me.

Update:  I have decided on using the Amazon S3 service for data backup.

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Google Drive

Why is a Google Drive so important to some people? Who cares!  What would be the business benefit to Google?  With Gmail, Search, Froogle and almost every other service offering, Google benefits by having more eyeballs for it's advertising engine.  Providing a free online storage service is costly and opens up Google to litigation should a users "really important" file get lost due to a service failure.

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Mac Pro

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Apple announced the final piece of it product transition from the PowerPC to Intel. The newer Mac are Apple's top of the line machines with dual Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processors (that's four CPU cores!), supports up to 2TB of storage and very fast video engines from ATI and Nvidia. The Mac Pro keep the case of the older G5 PowerMac and offers build-to-order options for processors, graphic cards, memory, hard drives, optical drives etc. I am salivating over these fine machines.