Online backup systems - like Carbonite?

I use Carbonite. I haven't had to use it for a complete restore, but I've used it to recover various files. However, I did have a friend who had to have her laptop re-staged, and when we re-installed Carbonite and tried to restore her stuff, it took forever to start restoring files (we ended up just using my external HDD to back up some stuff on her laptop before it was re-staged). Which makes sense, considering you're restoring not only gigabytes of data, but you're doing it across the internet. Still, I've never felt it was imposing on my system or slowing anything down, and if the backup doesn't succeed after a week, it will e-mail you and tell you that you haven't backed up your PC in more than a week. Here's the "bad" stuff I've found--it won't back up networked drives, they all have to be local, and on that front, if you want to back up more than 1 PC, you have to purchase a license for each PC. I tried to get around that by networking a drive from another PC to my PC, but it wouldn't work.

It's pretty intuitive, and it has defaults to back up when you set it up (My Documents and your Desktop I think). One thing I have it doing now is backing up my MP3 folder, so I shouldn't have to worry about losing that drive should something happen.

However, if you want to retrieve a file to a different PC, I don't know if that will work. I know when I installed Windows 7 on my wife's machine and changed the name of the PC, I re-synced Carbonite and changed the name of the PC in their system. I've never tried pulling down data to a different PC that's not on my account--I would imagine you probably can't do that. If you decide to sign up, let me know...I've got some discount codes that give you an extra month free, and if you use me as a reference, I get a month free as well.