Do You Know Where Your Data Is?

The spinning disk is bound to fail - they all do eventually. Safeguarding your personal data from the electronic abyss is now as easy as sending an email. Thanks to broadband and encryption technology, online backup has become a viable alternative to the old tape backups.

One online vendor in particular has developed a rock-solid solution. Mozy.com allows any computer to achieve the lofty status of being properly backed up. The Mozy solution works for PC's, MAC's and Servers.

Getting started is very simple. If you are interested in backing up your personal computer, they have a free option for the first 2gb. This is a fairly generous amount of storage if you don't need to backup music or movie files. If you need more storage, you can buy 1gb for .50/mo. after the initial $5/mo. license fee. So you can get about 10gb of storage for about $10 per month. For a personal computer, that should cover a lot of ground.

If you are small business, you can get multiple PC and server licenses for a reasonable monthly fee.

So how does it work? After you sign up and select your plan, you can download the "client" software. This small piece of software will ask you a few question during the install about what kinds of files you would like to backup. If you are not sure, the wizard will choose the typical types of files. Then, you set the time that Mozy should do it's thing. It's probably best to set a time like 11pm every night. This will insure there is enough time get a good batch of files before you need to start work in the morning.

If you are backing up over 10gb, the process might go for a couple of days. Don't worry, the Mozy backup process knows when you are working on the computer and will pause itself, not to suck up computer resources.

Every morning you can get an email notification showing the success of the backup from the night before. You can also logon to you account on Mozy.com and check everything about your data that was backed up.

And here is the greatest feature about Mozy. File restores actually work! If you've ever tried to restore from a tape, then you know the nightmare that can ensue. If you have accidentally deleted a file or directory, simply open the Mozy client and click "restore files" and it will walk you through the rest.