A general concern with any sort of outsourcing is how much and how long can you depend on the provider to be there? Lots of companies go from all is good to completely gone in the blink of an eye. What happens to your data (and your recovery plans) then?

Some specific concerns for outsourcing data storage: Is the server farm you are backing up to (some where in the land of tubes) actually redundant? Does the company have a mirroring / internal offsite backup approach? How often do they test their recovery process from full or incremental backups?

I don't have the fastest network connection in the world so, I have stuck with copies on hard drives for critical data (not really all that much space compared to all the stuff filling my hard drives) and some reasonable protection of the backups (one onsite in "hardened storage" - a fire safe, and one at work a mile or so away). That covers the likely scenarios I need to worry about while having a laptop covers most of the rest of my concerns.

Good luck finding what works for you.

- Eric