Recently, my web hosting provider offered me a free one year membership to a new site called Bandwagon.
Bandwagon, is an online service that offers to provide online backups of your iTunes library. They offer the service for $24 a year. At first my impression was "Hmm, $2/month to keep a backup of my 60GB iTunes library. Not bad." Of course after further reading, I found that they only store your iTunes metadata which really isn't that much space at all. You need to provide your own online storage through FTP. Ok, so not as good a deal, but I have tons of HD space on my web host and plenty of bandwidth to upload it, so I sign up for my free year and install the software.
The program installs no problem, reads my iTunes library and starts FTPing files up to my FTP site on my web host. "Great, now I'll just let it run for a few hours and my collection is backed up." The software needs some work though. The GUI uses that black, partially transparent style of window that is so popular on OS X these days. While pretty, that damn GUI insists on being the topmost application at all times! Which means I can't get rid of the thing shy of closing the window entirely! (which doesn't actually stop the program, it just hides the window). Ok, that annoying feature is gone.
After letting it run for a while, I decided to check and see how far it had gotten. Ok, after an hour I've only uploaded TWO files? What the heck? That's when I remember that while the download speed of my DSL is 6Mb/sec (about 800 kilobytes per second), the upload speed is much lower - around 800kb/sec. That means my upload speed is 10 times slower than my download speed! Now usually with a DSL connection that's fine since most of what you do is downloading. In this case though, it's a problem. For this, it's all uploading. Bandwagon then tells me that it will take 12 days for my entire 60GB iTunes library to upload! I am not going to leave my computer on for 12 days straight, just to upload this stuff! It would be easier to just burn it to a few DVDs.
It seems to me that online backup sites really aren't practical for someone running on DSL who has to backup a large amount of data. Until we start getting DSL with 6Mb/sec upload as well as download, this service is of little use.