Arthasya

what are popular services?

Amazon S3, Mosso, Mozy, Carbonite, IDrive, Backblaze, Dropbox, SugarSync, etc.

Which one should i use?

Depends. Encrypting the files before storage is the key. If you want to backup some sensitive files, it will be wise to privately encrypt the file before storing it online. Some of the backup services allow you to have a custom private key using which your data is encrypted. This key (or password) is known only to you and even company backing up your file can’t see the file without knowing the private key.

What is encryption?

Excerpt from wikipedia:

In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information (referred to as plaintext) using an algorithm (called cipher) to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information (in cryptography, referred to as ciphertext).

Here are some good links to get you started: wiki, truecrypt, EncFS

I want to share my data across several computers. Is there any service which works better than other?

I like Dropbox and Sugarsync. These services let you install their product on your desktop and sync files placed in certain folders across all computers. Nice thing is that you can access your files from web browser as well. I have heard some good feedback about dropbox. Only thing i didn’t like is that it won’t let you provide private custom key for encryption.

How about Amazon S3 ?

Amazon S3 is cool. It lets you store data on their cloud storage system at very cheap rate. Downside is that it hasn’t introduced any tool for consumers to upload files (but i think it is in works and should be out soon). So you kind of depend on third party tools to manage your files. There are some good ones out there like JungleDisk but you need to pay for them separately. Dropbox and ElephantDrive also use Amazon S3 behind the scenes.

What would be recommend for storing photos and videos?

I will recommend using services like Flickr and SmugMug for photos and videos. But in case you believe that you just want backup facility i will say go with Amazon S3. BTW, smugmug stores photos and videos on amazon s3 infrastructure.

I would like to know more about Online file storage and Encryption. Can you point to some good links?

Sure. Here you go:

http://www.brainonfire.net/blog/remote-encrypted-backup-duplicity-amazon-s3/

http://www.niquille.com/2008/06/15/amazon-s3-tripple-encrypted-true-rsync-backup/

http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.html