Techbax

As a keen photographer, I have a treasure trove of data that I would be distraught to loose, so data backup is of prime importance - especially knowing how unreliable hard drives can be (even server grade drives). A couple of years ago I was getting fed up with having to back up to an external hard drive and to DVDs (to take off site), so I decided to look at an online solution.

After a lot of Googling and reading reviews and forums, I settled on a service called Mozy. I signed up for the free 2GB service and installed their client app. It took a little while to configure, as I wanted to tweak everything to my exact requirements, but once everything was in place Mozy sat quietly in my system tray backing up my files whenever my PC was not in use. I soon filled up my free storage, so it was a no-brainer to get out my credit card and sign up for the full service!

Since then I have had peace of mind,that whenever I upload photos and movies onto my PC, I know that the Mozy client will kick in and soon be backing up my encrypted data to their secure storage. I still backup to my external drive, and make the odd DVD, but I'm not constantly worrying that I'm not up to date with my backups. I have also installed Mozy on my father's PC, and so no longer have to worry about his lack of backups either! 

So far Mozy has been extremely reliable, and I've never had any problems or network issues. Recently I had to move Mozy to a different PC (you pay per PC you install the client on) and the client app was clever enough to work out what data had already been uploaded, and so didn't upload it again. The client app allows you complete control over what you back up, how often it is backed up and the bandwidth/processing used. 

If you require the kind of backup that allows you to recover a certain version of a document on a certain day, or recover a file you deleted a year ago (deleted files are kept for 30 day) - then Mozy is probably not for you. However for a disaster recovery situation it's spot on!

As an IT professional I've seen the misery that can be caused by data loss, so please, please go and do some research on online storage providers and sign up with the one that fits your needs best. I'd recommend Mozy as it's been robust, error free and unobtrusive, but there are lots of other services out there to choose from...