Review Let's do a quick straw poll. How many of you back up your work laptop? Some have no choice - the IT department makes sure it happens. But the rest of us?

Now, how many of you know someone who has lost all the data on their laptop, through theft, hardware failure or accident? Look at all those hands - it doesn't look good, does it?

Things get more scary in the home, the small-office / home-office or the small business, where only the most anal make sure that their valued data (be it digital photos, email, sales reports or partially developed programs) are backed up. Given that computers are still so fragile, why do we leave ourselves so vulnerable? Perhaps because it's so tricky to protect data.

Sure, anyone can burn a CD, but where do you put it? If you do it every week, how do you know which one you should refer to? A full backup is too slow, but an incremental backup (picking up only those things that have changed) is almost impossible to manage, as anyone who has trawled through six months of increments looking for a particular file, will attest.

The proprietary formats used by many backup packages do not help, meaning you often have to remember what you used for the backup, so you can do a restore. There may be a package out there that has resolved these issues, but I'm not aware of it. So what chance has someone who hasn't spent the last 15 years working in IT?

Yes, there are answers, but you have to work hard to find them. For me, the only solution is for someone else to look after the problem.

To this end, I am trialling a service from a company called Connected.com. Essentially, it takes backups of my information to its servers, somewhere out there on the Internet.

Before you get alarmed by the concept of putting private data in the hands of an unknown third party, let me stress that the data is encrypted. Also, Connected has some very big customers - here's a a list. ecurity is about risk management, so each company and individual needs to assess the risk for themselves. But if Connected.com is good enough for Deloitte & Touche, Visa International and Lockheed Martin, it's good enough for me.

You gotta be connected

To get up and running I downloaded and installed an agent, which runs on my PC as a little icon in the system tray. I then had to specify which files I wanted to back up - for me, this was the My Documents directory, and the elusive little place where Microsoft insists on hiding my Outlook inbox. (Yes, I did try moving it a couple of years ago, but nothing ever worked as it should after that, so I learned my lesson) And if you're looking, try right-clicking on Personal Folders in Outlook and selecting Properties: it's in there somewhere.

There were some other bits and bobs - nothing is ever that simple. But to select the backup set was a straightforward operation. And then ... I just let things run. The first backup was decidedly uncomfortable, but perhaps understandable, given that 1.5Gb of files were identified and needed to be sent over an ISDN line - 15 years is a long time to be squirreling things away. It wasn't so bad: files were compressed by about 50 per cent and I let things run over the weekend.

After that, once every couple of days, I let the backup software chunter away and do its stuff. There is probably a more efficient way to identify if any files have changed, than to scan the entire directory structure every time, but this has not been a major issue.

Indeed, six months on, there have been very few major issues. The only one I can think of is how the Connected client works with large files – again, it’s not all that bright. If I shift stuff around from one place to another on my hard drive, it doesn't tend to realise that they are the same, and so it performs a new backup. And while I understand that the client should be coping with Outlook files (which can become very large), it doesn't always seem to do what is necessary, particularly with offline folders. This can be a pain if I've been shifting information from one offline folder to another. These are niggles, rather than showstoppers.

On the plus side, I now have a facility on my computer which ensures that every change to my own information is being saved offsite. The Explorer view in the Connected client shows me what has been backed up, and restoration is a simple matter of selecting a file or folder and requesting the restore. I can choose to see only the most recent versions of files, or multiple versions. There's no hunting through CDs, no chasing the person who knows how to load the jukebox. Job done. I confess I haven't done a complete bare-metal restore of all my data using this service - that first 1.5Gb download was off-putting - but the omens are good.

One thing well

Connected.com demonstrates that it is possible to run an Internet-based service cost-effectively and deliver real value to the user. The company does a single thing well, which is probably the best approach for all parties. Connected can concentrate on how to make the best use of its own IT infrastructure, for example, using the most cos- effective storage arrays, and shifting data between fast, expensive disks and slower, cheaper storage as necessary. Its pricing makes the package accessible to all but the most tight-fisted of users (these are likely to be the anal ones anyway, so they're more than capable to do their own backups).

ASPs died because the level of service they could provide wasn't considered up to scratch. There are some examples of companies that have emerged from the ashes, the (too)frequently quoted example is salesforce.com - but good on 'em, if they've made the business work. There will be others, each meeting different needs - for example, Web-based email security and compliance providers, such as MessageLabs, Black Spider and Zantaz. Each is doing one thing well, meaning that the onus is on each organisation to decide how best to use the right combination of services.

Several companies provide similar services to Connected.com, but they're all arriving from different perspectives. Hosted providers of Microsoft Sharepoint such as Cobweb, for example, enable users to upload information to Web-based servers so they can be shared - and the backup is delivered as part of the package. Companies delivering file transfer management, for example, Akamai, that provides the backbone for Apple's iTunes, are also enabling resilient file sharing. Peer to peer file sharing companies, for example, Groove, provide a level of data integrity by virtue of the fact that files are replicated between everyone in a workgroup.

None of these companies would consider themselves to be in competition with each other, but they offer a set of overlapping facets of a nebulous, nameless service that ensures both data accessibility and integrity, anywhere, any time. We are already used to somebody else having access to most of our data (how many people encrypt their emails before sending them?) so the idea of Web-based storage should not be too offensive.

So why are facilities such as online backup are not delivered as bundled services from the likes of Dell or HP, in the same way that they bundle anti-virus software? Perhaps it's only a matter of time; and it is highly likely that it will be only through OEM deals that offerings such as Connected.com will reach the mainstream.

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