I work for a small company and we are trying to come up with a good solution for backing up remote users. We have a few agents who travel with laptops, but they have very critical data on their machines that should be regularly backed up. We are looking for a solution that is mostly hands-off for the employee. We are considering online backups, however we would also like to consider other options.
if you dont have that many users, why not a portable hard drive, you can get a 500gb one for nothing these days
You could set up a small Linux server with enough disk space and use rsync to copy the critical data.
After the initial copy, rsync will only copy what has changed from the users laptop. so you wont be flooding your network.
Apart from the hardware, this solution would cost you nothing.