So far I've told you about two applications that were so awesome that I had no problem sending some cash to the developers to pay for continued use of the products. But both BeyondTV and Pocket Informant only require one time payments. Sure, you might want to pay for the major upgrades that are released every few years (smaller updates are usually free), but you don't need to keep paying to keep using the software. But now I want to tell you about a utility I'm gladly paying $50 a year to use: Carbonite, an online backup solution.

Recently someone I know, (I'm not going to name names, but his is an anagram for Brand Idler), may have accidentally wiped his wife's hard drive while trying to reinstall Windows XP. Sure, he backed everything up to a USB hard drive first so he could restore all of her important documents, media, and other files. But the hard drive was faulty and an awful lot of important data was unrecoverable.

This problem could have been easily avoided if Mr. Idler and his wife had spent a few bucks on Carbonite before the accident instead of signing up shortly after. Once installed on your computer, Carbonite will go to work backing up everything in your documents folders and any other oflder you specify. Items that are backed up will have a little green dot next to them, while items that are not yet backed up have a yellow dot. It can take a few days to perform your initial backup, but once that's completed subsequent backups go very quickly. And everything happens in the background so you can use your computer normally while backups are in process.

While you may still want to backup your files locally in case you need to restore them quickly or on short notice, knowing that all of your files are safely stored online and accessible from anywhere in the world provides quite a bit of piece of mind. Carbonite provides you with unlimited online storage space for $50 a year. You can get a discount if you sign up for two or three years in advance.

Carbonite is availble for Windows. There's also a beta version available for Mac users.