If all you have is 1GB-100GB, put it on Dropbox connected to 2-3 computers and forget about it. If you have 1TB or more data, look into Open-E SANs. They are very competitively priced.

I am vehemently against take-home-backups. You may trust your team members but they can still be robbed, get their cars/homes broken into, or just simply lose the drives. While chances of smart-criminal exploiting your data to gain competitive advantage is very low, the chances of your private information being sold to others is very high - someone can get your customer CC#s, employee SSNs etc. very easily. How often do we hear about an employee lose a laptop or HDD that contains 2 million CC#s and SSNs in an Excel or Access file? Please don't set yourself up for that.

With respect to backup software, my favorite way of backup on Windows is robocopy. I've been using it for 4+ years and it has worked flawlessly EVERY SINGLE time for me. I have very simple DOS scripts that mirror the entire source folder to destination\YYYY-MM folder. Since I only have about 300GB of data and 8TB of storage, I also mirror the source to destination\weekday folder. What this gives me is the ability to retrieve files from any day in last 7 days, or any past month (depending on disk space available). And destination\YYYY-MM always has last night's data.

    DOS>robocopy "\\SrcServer\SrcFolder" "\\DestServer\%weekday%" /E /R:1 /W:3 /PURGE /COPYALL /FFT

    DOS>robocopy "\\SrcServer\SrcFolder" "\\DestServer\%yyyy%-%mm%" /E /R:1 /W:3 /PURGE /COPYALL /FFT

If you have databases, dump the DBs once a night into one of the SrcFolders. Now you have pretty good backups of your DB too. HDD space is so cheap. I have 3 separate DestServers where I backup to. After the initial backup (and once a month), it's pretty fast each night. If you want remote backups but don't have the bandwidth to copy 20GBs a night, Open-E SANs work great for that. Of course, you can also use DeltaCopy (which is just Rsync for Windows).

If you are keeping customer CC#s in the first place, you are already violating a ton of laws and credit card agreements.

Our clients are big companies, we don't have nor use credit card machines. Strictly purchase orders and 5-figure checks each month. We are in another country and SSNs aren't used the same way like they are in the US (tied, to your bank, credit, retirement, etc). The most someone could do with an employee ID is buy products with our tax id, we'll happily take a VAT refund for you, or someone could use your SSN to apply for a job (can be problematic around tax time but not end of world).

We do have 2 NASes (one backs up the other) that do dailies. The USB drives are for office on fire/big theft tragedies. I'm trying to get us on cloud storage, but pushing data over a DSL connection was frustrating for just 20 gigs. And the connection died over a weekend. Far easier just to do the USB route. You still can't beat bandwidth of a local HNer living 10 minutes away with a bag of drives.

I hope you make encryption mandatory on those USB drives. Losing one could cost you (your) business!

Simple GPG encryption or even truecrypt containers work wonders.

I second this one. If you have personal data on people, make sure backups are encrypted. Also, if you are dealing with medical records of any type, make sure you comply with the law.

In the 90's, I was working for a gov research grant (social program) at a community college. It was a research grant and we only synced data with DC once a month (think dial-up). We rotated backups in three places: bank lock box, safe in IT person's house, and a safe in my apt 2 hours away. We were in a 100 year old building and we were kinda worried.

The gov site visitor was running one of the other programs and "wrote us up" for taking up too much time / effort with backups. we protested and got ourselves cleared to continue. Eight months later I was told that one of the sites lost all their data in a flood. Guess keeping all your data onsite in the basement doesn't really work.