Solution: Create a secure, remote back-up of all your data with Mozy
It was the end of summer in 2008 when the penny dropped that a good portion of my life hinged on a piece of magnetic material that spins around erratically every few minutes.
At first I heard a strange whirring sound - like a Boeing 747 taking-off - coming from my Mac during a game of Guitar Hero. Then applications started to take an incredibly long-time to load. Then....well then I realized that my hard drive was failing and horror struck.
The simple fact was that I'd put a lot of faith in that tiny, spinning magnet. My entire music library was on there. Family photographs. Movies I'd purchased. Even tax returns and contacts. If the hard drive failed, my heart would have quickly followed.
The simple answer would have been to back-up everything onto a external hard drive that plugs into your computer, and that's still something I'd highly recommend. But that method isn't totally foolproof either. What if your house burns down, or there's a flood, or somebody breaks-in to your house/apartment and steals your laptop AND your hard drive. Well then you're as screwed as if you didn't back-up at all.
Over the last 12 months I've been using a service called Mozy which allows you to back-up your files in a remote location. Fork out $4.95 per month and Mozy gives you unlimited online storage space, so you can back-up your entire 50,000 song MP3 collection or just a couple of Word docs - the choice is yours.
In order to use Mozy you download a tiny application to your computer. This application scans your hard-drive and then silently backs-up your data in the background while you're surfing the Web and pissing away the hours on Facebook. If disaster strikes and you need to restore a file, you can log-in to your account on any computer and see all your backed-up files. Simply click the ones you want to restore and voila - your data is back.
When you use Mozy for the first time - and if you want to back-up your entire hard drive - it will take some time.....in some cases 2-3 days (no joke). But once the first effort is complete, Mozy only backs-up incremental changes and thus is much quicker.
Check out the video above for a walk through of some of Mozy's core features.
3 comments:
"...if your house or your office was to burn down" sheesh Hills, lighten up :)
hello governour! i swear by carbonite but i'm sure mozy is ok...
Carlos the Hacker! Thanks for the comment my friend.
I've also heard very good things about Carbonite too and one of the main reasons why I use Mozy is because it offers a Mac version.
Having said that, I noticed that Carbonite have released a Mac Beta so I'll be curious to see how that performs.
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