It has been now several months, even years, I’m looking for a robust, safe and efficient way to back-up all the stuff I have on my Macs (and job PCs): my precious family photos and movies (roughly 750 GB for the last two years), my iTunes Library (musics, TV shows, movies, podcasts and iPhone apps, around 550 GB) and the various documents I created or downloaded (emails, postmails, websites and blog contents, hardware & software documentation, about 320 GB).
My engineering school mate who is an Oracle DB & Java expert for one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators advised me on physical NAS but nones from Hard Disk Drive manufacturers (cause of proprietary solutions). He gave me as very good products: Synology and Drobo. Both are proposing kind of “plug & play & follow” products with zero management using a Web browser GUI (one is in AJAX).
OR 
A good friend of mine who is also an IT/IS Expert managing datacenters and the Enterprise IS on a daily basis advised me to use an online backup solution such as Mozy or Carbonite. He had the bad experience of losing 2TB (out of 7 TB) of data with two physical NAS and have decided to go online.
OR 
I still wonder what is the best solution… Online will required a very good internet connection, stable with a high data transfer rate. Physical will require to have a PC+MAC management system, choose a RAID disk management (RAID5 at least), low power consumption, hot-swappable if one disk crashes and of course several Hard Disk Drives with high capacity and data transfer rate (with same specifications to avoid bottleneck issues).
Who already experience the Mozy | Carbonite | Other online back-up service or the Synology | Drobo | Others physical solutions?
What is your back-up system, finally?
[update]
A third one just comes in the selection: QNAP TS-509 Pro TurboNAS
It’s gonna be very hard to find the best compromise… What will be your choice or at least advice?
source: Raym.Blog
A friend and I have built a Windows look-alike mapped Linux drive using SMB (Samba) that offers data version control and continuous, near real-time data mirroring transfer to a second drive at a remote site using a second box via an internet connection. It is called “BIM-BAM”, we see an application for small business backup (e.g. accountants, attorneys, engineers, architects) and collaboration (large 3D models) for small consultancies. Since the data is replicated at each remote site, very limited file management is required, allowing data to “flow” between offices/sites. Check out http://www.saint-joe.com or bimstrategy.com for further info. We are looking for a distribution network now and strategic partners.
You are way behind… I went through this 2 years ago and spent some time speaking with JH (SolidWorks) about it. Our conclusion was http://www.junkdisk.com (amazon service). Works great and you don’t need a fantastic internet connection once you get past the initial upload. But I would tell you that this is great but not enough. I also run a NAS solution (in basement) which is part of why I use junkdisk. NAS is not fire proof. But what about getting back and running after a crash? All the backup is great but recovery time really sucks. I do not back applications and system information. So how about a third solution a disk image solution? I think this makes sense if you want fast recovery but this is not something I have done.