Heya,
You could make two very inexpensive redundant storage units sitting on UPS and in separate buildings connected over a network, one that backs up all your local network systems, and the other is a mirror backup of that backup and is off site. Then you don't pay any middle man anything. The systems could be as cheap as $350 each, but for a comfortable level of security and redundancy, I would push that budget to $500 for each system and add another $120 or so per system for a quality UPS to keep them powered during an outage/dip in electricity.
You could take this approach and make several off-site backups with cheap redundant storage computers where ever you have internet access.
(Note, if Linux scares you or you want to keep it a Windows environment, you can still do it for free. Know someone in college? You, a friend, your kid, whoever. Microsoft Dream Spark. Free Windows Server 2008 and other softwares for students.. It's actually real. They are legit. So long as you're a student (they verify) or whoever registers is a student, you can get it for free and it's free forever after it's registered to you. I got Windows Sever 2003, 2008, 2008 R2, etc, that way. It's a wonderful thing. It's cheaper to register at a college, register for a class, and get it free, than to buy it straight up (cheaper by like... hundreds, haha). You get the idea.)
-- What's your budget? If you're interested in eliminating the monthly bill to an off site service, you can save what you pay by building your own machine (or several of them) and have access to said data even if the internet died (since you can go get the physical drive and it's not in some other state over a network). I'd be happy to make a list of inexpensive hardware components to do this with. As well as free software solutions that require little knowledge and a very low learning curve for use.
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For example, here's some budget machines that you can make several of. They're based on budget redundancy. So the OS drive is redundant. The storage drives are redundant. The storage drives are where the backups go. And it's 1TB of redundant storage for backups. Low power draw.
Motherboard - A6VMX2-K
$40
CPU - AMD Sempron 45w
$35
RAM - Gskill 512Mb DDR2 667
$13
PSU - RV350
$25
HDD1 - WD 320Gb (RAID1, so two drives)
$48 (x 2)
HDD2 - WD 1TB (rsynched/fbackup)
$85 (x 2)
Case (has good airflow for HDD's)
$50
Power draw will be around 50watts or so. So very inexpensive to run 24/7 wherever they are. Powerful enough to run most current OS's, but more along the lines of budget, we use Linux (a stripped distro with only what's needed for networking and FTP and synching/mirroring of drives). The system actually has over 2.56TB of space, but it's configured so that the 320Gb drives are mirrored in RAID1 for uptime (so if a drive fails, the system doesn't stop and the server is still running and able to backup). That's way more space than any OS will ever need for this, but with the cost of drives these days, you don't get a cheaper price getting lower capacity drives, they all pretty much hit this price level from here all the way down to a 4th of the capacity, so we get what we can for the same price, hence the 320. After that, you have two 1TB low power drives. That's normally 2 TB of capacity, but one will be synched to the other so that any data you backup to one drive, is also then mirrored to the other drive. You effectively get a place for large capacity backups (and you can take the drives out without worrying about the server itself, since it's installed on separate drives) and it has redundancy against a drive failure since both drives have the same data. Set it up as an FTP server. Use whatever backup software you like, there's some good ones that are free in Linux. You can do manual and scheduled backups via FTP transfer over the web. Place the units on UPS units rated for 200watts or so (and have them shut down automatically after 2 minutes of running on battery for safe shut downs). Have several of these units, put them off site from your office where the LAN'd computers are so that you have real backups safe from environmental damage and theft. One at the office to backup your networked computers. Then either 1 or 2 more of these servers off site in different locations to backup that backup for a 3:1 redundancy ratio of backup, and each backup has a 1:1 ratio of redundancy itself (for an effective 6 individual copies of the backed up data sets... that's redundancy).
Cost per unit break down:
Machine & Case: $163
HDD's for the massive redundancy: $266
Total price for the unit: $430
(Notice a lot of the money went into the storage capacity and redundancy)
With a draw around 50watts for 24/7 use, it'll cost about $1 to $2 a month to run electric bill wise.
-- Note, you could do these units for cheaper. I guessed at your storage needs and went with redundancy 1TB. That may be too much. That may also be too small. It depends on the nature of the data and the size of the backups and how many backups you want to keep and for how long based on the frequency of backup. These units could be reduced to as cheap as $250 with 1TB of capacity (but no redundancy), and then simply have several units separate from each other making each one redundant to another. I went up to more levels of redundancy simple for saftey (which you may not require) by having more than one machine for backups, each machine with a redundant separate OS drive setup, and each machine with a separate redundant large capacity 1TB drive setup. So there is a lot of play room based on your needs. No middle man costs. You just build it. Put them on the network. And you're flying.
Very best,
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