These are exciting times and another idea turned gold is Jungle Disk. A cross-platform Amazon S3 interface for remote storage. They setup a WebDAV service on your machine that runs their bits to encrypt and transmit your files up to Amazon’s S3 service.
Never heard of S3? Neither had I until visiting the Day of .NET in Arbor this past October. I happened to catch the tail end of Joe Klunk’s “Storage (and more) in the Cloud” session. He built a quick .NET application to push files up to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Now that wasn’t mind blowing as I had done WebDAV operations back in the heady days of ASP, “classic”. What was mind blowing was the price for storage: $0.15 USD, per month, per GIG-**a-byte**.
Now the folks at JungleDisk has just made a program that even our mother’s can use to properly backup their systems. It’s a great connected world!