Thanks to Lin of the Social-Networking blog, for pointing out a free backup service. MediaMax is a backup service that is free for the first 25GB; the service is detailed by MediaMax:

MediaMax, powered by Streamload, gives you a private and secure place to upload, store, access, and share your personal videos, photos, movies, music, and files.

You can store files of up to 25GB in size and access these files from anywhere on the web. You can also Share Files with people, as well as hosting slideshows and music sessions all from their storage site.

After reaching 25GB of storage, the service is a pay-as-you-go service costing you USD4.95 a month for 100GB of storage room, download or share 10GB in the month and send files of up to 1GB in size.

I have started using MediaMax in that I like the idea of 25GB of free storage, and that I can get at my files from any computer and anywhere using a browser across the Internet. However, the download and installation of the synchronization tool MediaMax XL was a minefield of difficulties, and only installing on Windows flavored operating systems (Windows 2000 or newer is required). So that means I cannot backup my Ubuntu machine; I will have to copy all my data files on the Ubuntu machine to a Windows machine to get the files backed up.

My backup is happening in the background; the 22.9GB of music, photographs, original word processed documents, and PDF files (marketing materials gleaned from online marketers over the last 5 years) is being backed up now. The MediaMax XL tool has backed up 19% of 22.9GB which is 4.4GB over the last 24 hours. So at this rate the backup will take 4 to 5 days to complete fully. This is by no means fast. The last backup service I was using at Godaddy.com backed up these files in just a little over 36 hours.

Godaddy.com does not have media playing devices such as promised here at MediaMax so the move gives me extra functionality in using my stored files. Will keep you informed as to how well MediaMax performs as a backup service.