Many of us don't backup, its so easy to put off, and the task only gets larger the longer it is left. For me backups are beyond essential and I actually practice double backup, I have a local backup but I want an online one too incase everything is robbed etc.
When I worked for Apple, all the online backup services had free trials for Apple employees, so I tried Crashplan for a month, BackBlaze for another and finally Carbonite.
As you can imagine I have some pretty serious data requirements, with about 5TB needing backing up.
Having tried all three, the factors important to me are : Upload Speed, Ease of Restore, Security and Reliability.
At the end of the 3 months, I in all areas found BackBlaze to be the best service in my opinion and have been using it for 2 years now.
Consistently in my trial (and still do) I would get the highest upload speeds and the easy downloading of selected content is excellent.
You can choose to encrypt your files as they are being uploaded, meaning not even Backblaze staff can read your backups.
My backup as of today.
Additionally BackBlaze do and publish a lot of research into hard drive reliability, which is encouraging, google for "backblaze blog" and you will find it.
Finally, I pay $5 a month for unlimited space for one computer and unlimited external drives. (Thats how I have 5TB backed up on it). For the external drives, they needed to be plugged in once every 30 days or they disappear off the backup. If you have left them unplugged for 20 days, back blaze start emailing to you remind you to plug them in for a few minutes.
For me its not an issue anyway as they are plugged in all the time. Finally, I do have a local backup too, but only this week, I found that human error on my part 2 weeks ago had deleted 6GB of photos from my drive and my physical backup. Since Backblaze also allows you restore files from within certain time periods as its incremental, I got it back within the hour.
If you want to signup here are two links:
https://secure.backblaze.com/r/00cnev
(the above link credits me as a referral, if you don't want to do that just visit http://BackBlaze.com )
Finally, for those unsure, this is not a sponsored post, just an honest opinion based on my expereince.