Hurricane drives interest in online backups | CNET News.com

Hurricane drives interest in online backups | CNET News.com: "In Hurricane Katrina's watery aftermath, companies that provide online file-backup services are reporting a sharp increase in business.
'Because of the New Orleans disaster, we have an uptick from almost all over the nation,' said Raghu Kulkarni, a spokesman for Pro-Softnet of Woodland Hills, Calif., which sells a service called iBackup.
Online backups let you store a copy of valuable information at another location that's geographically separate from your home or business.
That's valuable in case a serious disaster like a flood, hurricane, or earthquake ruins a computer and any backups stored in the same place. Online backups, which have become increasingly popular as high-speed Internet connections proliferated, also guard against more commonplace problems such as theft or fire.
Online backup providers also are seeing an increase in hurricane-affected customers requesting access to their archived data as they struggle to recover. eVault, a company in Emeryville, Calif., has found 'a spike in demands in terms of restores,' said Tony Barbagallo, a senior vice president of marketing. "