I paid for 1yr of Carbonite online back-up storage. Then quit as it was WAY TOO SLOW to be practical. (I’m back to using external hard drives.)

Now Apple is building in similar cloud back-ups. Will it work?

… I have not had the best experiences when experimenting with Lion Internet Recovery. One attempt to use it on my MacBook Air during the week when iOS 5, iCloud and the iPhone 4S launched resulted in a recovery, just for Mac OS X Lion, that was going to take well over nine hours to complete! Ouch. …

… recovering and restoring a computer to full working order could take up to two days …

Cult of Mac – The Reason Why The World Isn’t Ready For Lion Internet Recoveries [Opinion]