100 gigs is about $1000/year.

For $200 you can get 2 external 160 gig hard-drives.

unfortunately gmail is limited to 10mb per email. But there are free services like divshare which I haven't tried yet but am curious about.

divshare has 200mb file limits. that's pretty damn good.

there's also mediafire which sound pretty rad and is 100% free.

and xdrive which has 5gb for free (aol company), but they also offer 50gb pro service.

box.net offers 1gb for free, but unfortunately the pro version is limited to 10gb.

So essentially, there are great free or affordable services, but your absolute best bet is to pay for something like ibackup. but it's not cheap.

Why not just an external HD kept in a safety deposit box? It'd be cheaper. And any disaster that destroys both your house and a bank vault is going to leave you with bigger problems than your music collection, if you survive.

The other thing to be aware of is that uploading 100GB of essentially uncompressable mp3 files is going to take days, unless you have a goodly chunk of a T3 connection. Even then, you're at the mercy of the servers on the other end, which are probably going to be throttled to something reasonable, if they have many clients concurrently accessing.

So, if you upload your collection, and then make 10GB of deletions/additions/changes, you'd need, at least, a differential backup of that 10GB, in addition to your original 100GB, even if you still only had 100GB in "your" copy of the revised collection. And you'd have to bring down both the 100GB backup and the 10GB diff, and merge them, to recreate your later 100GB version. So, if you change your collection around much, any service you use is going to have to include change backup space, for at least one or two backup generations, and you need local disk space to pull down your base backup and all subsequent diffs, to recreate your latest version locally, until you upload a new base.

Cost wise, speed wise, and practicality of handling the size files you'll need over time, get a couple of quality external hardrives, back up your stuff in a couple of generations, and have other people keep them for you, or take a copy to work, and have a friend keep one for you.

well, i purposely didn't say "get an external!" because you said you didn't want to do that.

but, if you do change your mind I recommend something in the lacie family. I got a sweet deal on a d2 Extreme from buy.com and it looks like they still have that deal.

Mozy Backup?
$5.00 a month for unlimited backups. They're stupid enough to go out of business in a year or two, but hey. Whilst it lasts, right...

nice find seanyboy, too bad it's not mac friendly yet, otherwise i might give them a shot. i wonder how they stay in business.