Like every other professional geek, I get more than my share of friends, family, and friends of friends asking for technical advice and support. At the top of my list of recommendations is that the SOHO crowd, which for my money includes anyone that doesn't have an IT department, should get an account with an on-line backup service.

Apparently enough people have been taking my advice for the big boys of the storage business to take notice. Iron Mountain now owns Connected Corp. and LiveVault, Seagate's acquired EVault, EMC snapped up Berkeley Data Systems, who ran Mozy, and last month IBM announced it was picking up Arsenal Data Solutions.Arsenal was a pioneer in online server backup and has always had a business orientation with services that included extensive management and backup solutions for hosted applications, as opposed to Mozy or even Connected, which concentrated more on laptop users. They'll be joining IBM's Business Continuity and Resiliency Services (BCRS) business unit, giving all those nice men in blue suits and wing tips yet another service to sell.

I'll be taking a closer look at online backup services over the next couple of months as I'm a bit disappointed in my current provider and need to find a new one.