Making backups is a critical thing for everybody who uses a computer, especially if your business is based on it. But how to make sure your data is really safe?

Our optimum backup solution should be:

able to deal with multiple notebooks and servers running on different operating systems (Windows Vista, Windows 2003 Server, Mac OS, Debian and Ubuntu Linux),
stored on safe place outside the office,
secure (not accessible by others without a password)
and automated.

We decided to use online backup systems. After evaluating some of the available solutions we came up with signing up for:

Amazon S3 web service in combination with Jungledisk – because the Jungledisk client is available for all our operating systems
Mozy Pro – because the Mozy Pro client is able to create backups of MS Exchange and MS SQL server while they are running

Both of the systems allowed us to encrypt our data before sending it. With the jungle disk mounted on our Linux systems it was very easy to create cron jobs for backing up SVN repositories, MySQL databases and other stuff.

We are also using this solution to backup the database of our online time tracking solution for BlackBerry and iPhone – timr.

UPDATE: There is even a free 2GB backup from Mozy which is ideal for private users to backup their documents.

UPDATE2: I wrote a how to on my personal blog for using jungle disk on virtual servers.