Backups are a modern fact of life. Every organization that has any kind of computing technology (and that is all of them these days) needs to back up its data in case of technological or user errors. Traditionally, large-scale backups have been done via an internal or external tape drive that takes magnetic tapes (minicassettes, essentially) and puts the compressed data from the server onto the tape. These tapes are neither cheap nor fast and require a human being to move them around. From changing tapes on a daily basis to moving tapes out of the initial location in case of catastrophic damage to the organization's building, their maintenance is pretty labor-intensive, at least in comparison to a backup solution that takes advantage of always-on internet access and nighttime low-bandwidth times to run backup copies of the data and send it, via the internet, to the cloud. When it came time to buy a new set of magnetic tapes for backups and to replace one of the servers, the author decided to check out the possibility of using the cloud to back up the data, avoiding the purchase of more tapes and a tape drive for the new server. She discovered that there were a number of vendors out there willing and able to provide one with backup solutions--but those solutions were sometimes difficult to compare and required that one has a pretty good idea of everything to back up. In this article, the author discusses how to research, evaluate, and choose a backup service in the cloud.