The first place is to a second set of 500GB drives in a Firewire enclosure, one drive for a mirror, the other for drive images of the system drive. To do the mirroring, I use a program called Mirror Folder, which I have had forever. It does folder watching and either real-time sycning, or scheduled syncing between a source and destination. Everything on the storage drive gets mirrored every two hours to one of the Firewire drives. In addition to this, I use Acronis True Image 2009 to make an image of my system partition (the dual 640GB drives) twice a month that is stored on the second Firewire drive. This way, if the house is burning down, I just grab the Firewire drive and run. This will give me a usable image of my system, as well as a backup of all of my archived data.

If that fails, I have a secondary backup using IDrive online backup service. Every night I have a set of watched folders (the most important stuff) backed up to their service online that I can restore to any machine, and access via their website if I ever need to. They also keep revisions of files as they change, letting me roll back if I botch something horribly. It will not restore my whole machine or anything, but it gives me piece of mind knowing my most important data is backed up somewhere offsite. It came down between Carbonite and IDrive and I ended up choosing IDrive for its better usability both online and via its desktop application. It’s not unlimited space like Carbonite, but I’m not using all of the space anyway, so no big deal.

Now, this is just my backup process for worst case disaster scenarios. For daily syncing/sharing of files between the multitude of computers that I use, I primarily use DropBox to sync files, and LiveDrive for online sharing and storing of random stuff. I recently switched from ZumoDrive to LiveDrive because they allow uploads within their web interface. My other reason for switching was since I was part of their beta, they offered me a one year unlimited account for half off. I figured I would give it a shot and let everyone else catch up and re-evaluate them all at the end of the year. I am a HUGE fan of DropBox, so hopefully by then, they will have a few more key features added so I can rely just on them (and better pricing).

So there you have it.

I also don’t get why everyone keeps criticizing Apple for not having one, or spreading rumors that they will have one at some point. Why? Apple already has two notebooks that fit in the category of “sub-notebook”, granted, they are a bit bigger than the normal Netbooks, but they are still small, and far more functional. I’m talking about the $999 13″ Macbook, based on the previous white model, and the super thin Macbook Air. While they are out of the price range of typical Netbooks, but they are far more functional, and have full size screens and keyboards. I would much rather spend the extra money one something I can get plenty of use out of as opposed to a cheap product that I can only do a few things on, then switch to a different product to do the rest. But I guess that’s just me. And we are talking about Apple here, if there isn’t a decent profit margin to be had, then it’s not worth their time and development. If they would fix some of the glaring omissions in the iPhone, they would have no need for a Netbook.