Initially, I’ve been thinking that cloud services are for businesses and big corporations, but when you see price tags for the service (see more details for Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2 and S3, Google) it becomes obvious that even home user can leverage those.
For some time I was looking for a solution to backup my data on the Windows Home Server. I have a lot of photos and home videos with family or public events and of course I don’t want to loose those in case of any fire, flooding or theft. While typically thieves don’t steal paper photographs, they will do that by stealing the computer inside the house. In case of fire or flooding – both, physical and electronic copies could be destroyed easily. Today, to protect most vital data, I’m trying (yes, that doesn’t happen regularly) to copy the data to the external hard disk and move it to the remote location (office 
). It works, but not as good as I would like to.
Yesterday, after a little hint, I stumbled upon Cloudberry backup solution for WHS. The interesting thing was that it allows to backup data to the well known clouds: Amazon and Azure.
There are other “backup providers” like KeepVault, which have similar pricing (at the moment I’ve looked at) and backing up to the hard drive that is stored remotely might be more price efficient than using cloud solutions in the long term, but it is obvious that there are interesting use cases for cloud services for private usage.
One obvious benefit that CloudBerry Lab backup solution has over the KeepVault to me - is the ability to choose preffered online storage provider. Amazon and Microsoft seem to be strong players in the cloud market, therefore I think there is a bigger chance that they and their services will live longer.
Update:
Later I have noted that there is a possibility to get a free license if you’re blogger (see FAQ). So, as a result of posting this blog post, I’ve received nice holiday gift – a free Cloudberry backup for WHS license. Big thanks to Cloudberry Lab.