The very important and often over-looked activity of data back-up is made easy at Mozy.com
Four years ago it happened to me. I was a victim of a horrible theft. Pictures were taken, memories lost, financial records gone, my music collection ripped from my possession. That’s right – my hard drive crashed. I have never been so sick to my stomach with agony. I never saw it coming – I had taken such good care of that HP Pavilion… why me? Well, the bottom line is you never know when a computer’s hard drive is going to crash, so while I had heard so many times about the importance of backing up my data, I never did it. Ironically, just two months before my laptop crashed, my parents had gotten me an external hard drive as a Christmas present, because I had asked for one… with the intention of supporting my ever-growing music collection – not for back-ups…
It only takes one time of losing literally thousands of pictures of my daughter and thousands of songs that made up my entire collection of then thrown-away CDs to realize that you need a back-up plan. I knew all about data back-up, trust me – very good, hands on experience. The place I had worked at as a database developer and project manager had a back-up system; one that came in handy many times over the course of my employment there. I knew the process – the Network Appliance, the offsite tapes, etc., etc… But at home, I couldn’t even take the 30 minutes to back-up pictures I will never get back again?
Times are much different now-a-days! Now back-ups are as normal around my house as going to the grocery store every week. Many experts recommend that you have a dual back-up plan (many even say three or more back-up sources are even better), and that is exactly what I have. The first back-up that is done for me every week is to my external hard drive. It is just a USB-driven drive that has about 300 GBs of space on it. My Microsoft Live OnCare application runs the back-up on both of my laptops by itself every Saturday night at 11:00 PM. I don’t even need to worry about it at all. The second back-up step required a little bit more research lately, as I wanted to find a good, affordable online back-up service. I was between three different services: Mozy, Carbonite, and Jungle Disk.
First I looked at Jungle Disk. Powered by Amazon, this service was quickly thrown out because the cost structure was unreasonable. They charge $0.15 per GB per month, and on top of that, throw in a charge for the uploading and downloading of data traffic. Given the amount of data I have, and how often I wanted to execute back-ups, this just was too much. For a serious geek running a small database business or something, this might be a good option, but not for a typical home user.
The second option I explored was Carbonite. Backed and supported by tech-geek Leo Laporte, who I am a big fan of, Carbonite finished a close second for me. All the services I needed were there, but to be honest, I couldn’t find the answers to some of the questions I had about multiple machines, monthly billing plans, etc. on their website, so I moved onto my third option – Mozy.
I like Mozy for a bunch of different reasons. It is incredibly simple from start to finish. You can open up a free account to start, which gives you 2 GBs of storage. The download and install was very easy and setup was smooth. The application has absolutely no impact on your daily computing. It runs when your machine is idle, and if it gets cut off in the middle of a back-up run, it just resumes where it left off when it stopped. You control when you want it to do back-ups. I have mine set up to run every day at 11:00 PM. I tested the restore feature, and while it did take some time to figure it out, it was relatively simple. If you decide the 2 GB solution works, you can easily upgrade to the paid version which gives you unlimited back-up storage for just $4.95 a month. Now that is a deal! I quickly upgraded both my laptops, and now I have an online storage solution I am happy with.
I recommend you check out Mozy, and even the other options that are out there, but no matter what you choose for your needs – just do it!
Robert Stanke is a business and technology consultant specializing in the marketing, staffing, research and analytics industries. You can learn more about him at his website and blog, found at http://robertstanke.com.
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