SPENDING HOURS SENDING CLIENTS GIGABYTE-SIZE FILES ON DISC OR PER forming tedious backups of critical data is no way to keep your business humming along. Those tasks should take just a few mouse clicks-and they can, with the right online service.

Online file-sharing and backup services charge pennies per megabyte to secure your data on their remote storage systems, and this could be an invaluable tooL Back¬ing up data to discs or tape in your office won't do you much good if the office is bro¬ken into or suffers fire damage. You should store-and update-critical data off-site. Furthermore, companies ranging from architectural firms to real-estate offices ofren have to send files that exceed the attachment-size limits for most ISPs' e-mail servers. And different clients often request the same files and information repeatedly.

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The solution is to subscribe to an online service that will let you not only auto-matically upload and store data to its systems but also assign sharing privileges and passwords to clients and employees. IBackup, for example, charges just Rs.400 a month for 5GB of storage and sharing space. XDrive has similar pricing and an even simpler interface. As its name suggests, XDrive's client software creates what appears to be an extra drive on your systems, so you can copy files by simply dragging and dropping them to it. Iomega's iStorage Professional Edition is priced at Rs.l,OOO for 5GB and is designed for small to midsize businesses. It offers all of the above features, and businesses can also use it to give employees and important customers their own online storage space.

The hurricane may never come, but at least you'll know where your data is the next time a hard drive crashes or a laptop goes missing.