By comparison, a 1TB external hard drive can be had for less than $100 via sites such as , and such as Mozy's MozyHome charge $5.95 per month for as much as 50GB of storage capacity.

LaCie makes secure backup easy with its new service. There's no need to configure a drive with encryption and then set up a separate online backup service. With CloudBox, files selected for backup are automatically stored locally and to the cloud.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

in Computerworld's Networked Storage Topic Center.