Jeffrey C. Long

I’ve been meaning to write for quite some time on some of the software and habits that have made my life work so much better. I often harp online about people backing up. My coworker recently had her computer crash and she lost all of her pictures. I just got an external hard drive and I’m about to make a backup of my entire hard drive so that I can send my laptop in for warranteed repairs. My CD drive doesn’t work.

But there is a cheaper alternative if all you want to do is back up your pictures and documents: Mozy. http://www.mozy.com. You can sign up for a free account and get 2gigs of backup for free. It’s a little program that runs in the background and pays attention to folders you’ve told it to back up. When you put something new there, it automatically backs it up to your online account. It works on both Mac and PC. You can just tell it to back up your documents folder and leave it alone. I also keep a backup of my keychain which is where all my passwords and serial numbers for software goes. If anything bad happens, it’s a piece of cake to restore. 

I still recommend a thorough backup strategy. I have my itunes library backed up to DVD. A bootable backup of my entire hard drive. And you should also have an offsite backup. I’ve heard of someone who backs up to DVD and mails it to his Mom. Or like me, you could get a a paid account to Mozy that is unlimited, so my applications, music library, documents and pictures are backed up there. That way if your house catches fire and your DVD’s and hard drive are destroyed, you still have your files. 

Like I keep saying to my friends, there are two types of people in the world: those whose hard drives have failed and those whose hard drives w-i-l-l fail. Don’t be like my friend who just lost her invaluable photos. Get a mozy account and get to backing up.