After my initial article on this topic, one of the readers said to check out Mozy as a good vendor and value for backing up files on your home PC. Well I took a look and signed up. for only $60 a year, I can back up unlimited data, which at the moment, comprises of about 20 gigs of pictures, video files, mp3’s, and documents. It seems to work very well and automatically scans and finds the best files on your computer to back up (pictures, Outlook email file, documents, etc.). The only additional step that I needed to do was to tell the program to backup my Windows shared documents folder since that was not picked up in the original scan.
Overall it is well worth the money and easy to use.
The only thing to make this better would be a faster up speed connection, but that is my cheapo DSL connection that is causing that bottleneck. It did take about 6 days for all of my data to get backed up, but now everything is up to date and being backed up every week. I did notice that my Internet connection slowed to a crawl during this time and changing the bandwidth limiter in the Mozy program seemed to have no affect. I’m not sure if this was an issue of the program or my DSL account though.
Check them out here: http://mozy.com/
Now go backup your files!
Original post below
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Do you really want to loose years of digital pictures and other files?? You don’t need to….
Loosing data does not have to happen and there are easy ways to backup your files over a broadband connection. And it is usually cheap or even free to boot.Waident support small to mid sized business, but with todays technologies, people inevitably work from home and on the road. Because we support the users rather than just the technology, we often end up helping people outside of the office and their home machines. We see over and over again people at home (and yes even at the office…) having computer problems that end up trashing their hard drive, loosing years of files. It is VERY expensive to send the hard drive off site to recover data, so make your life easier, and sign up for a service to do this.
The Google directory below lists many vendors that provide an Internet file backup service.http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Site_Management/Backup/
- If you don’t want to use a service, minimally, purchase a USB hard drive and use Windows Backup to copy your files to the USB drive on a weekly or monthly basis. Just set a calendar reminder to get it done. This is inexpensive, easy, and will save a lot of grief when your hard drive fails and you want to get back the years of digital pictures you had.
- Use a hosted service. The advantage to this is that the files reside outside of the house. If there is ever a fire or flood, you still have your data available. This can be free only about $5 per month depending on how much data you are looking to backup.
There are many vendors providing a hosted backup service and more coming online daily, including Microsoft and Google. I’ve never used any of these services, but am considering it for my home computer. I have years worth of video and pictures of the kids that I don’t want to loose if something ever happens to my house.
For businesses, we have used Intronis eSureIt (http://www.intronis.com/) and were impressed with the functionality and price point. Give me us call if you have you have any questions or comments about your backup needs.
September 2007
