mgroves

How often do you back up your hard drive? What if your hard drive crashed tomorrow, or your house burned to the ground as a result of a tragic blimp accident? (Goodyear? No, the worst.)

Wouldn’t it be nice to have as good of a backup policy as businesses, corporations, and hosting companies?

For about $5 a month, you can. It’s called Mozy, and this is not a paid endorsement.

You install a very nice little client program on your computer, choose the directories, files, folders, etc that you want to keep backed up, and the MozyHome client takes care of the rest. A free account gives you 2gb of space, and a paid account gets you unlimited space (for one computer). Any file you delete on your PC will be deleted after 30 days on your backup. There are about 4 different handy ways to restore your files (via web, DVD, a virtual drive that appears in “my computer”, and even a context–right click–menu).

Worried about the security of your data? Don’t want anyone at Mozy or anywhere else to see your 30 gigs of japanese porn comics? No problem. Mozy will encrypt your data with 448-bit blowfish encryption, and then send it via SSL to their servers. Yes, 448-bits. You’ll be long dead before your data could be brute forced. Still not enough? Use your own encryption key on the data. Of course, if you forget your key, that data will never be seen by anyone ever again.

Mozy’s data is stored in a fireproof, earthquake-proof location, with redundant power systems. For anyone to physically get to it, they need two different types of authentication (I’m assuming retina scan and DNA match, but maybe that’s just Mission Impossible). Not good enough for you? Where is your data stored now, skippy? Fort Knox?

So yeah, get the free version, give it a try. They even have a client for Mac. No Linux, though.

This service has already saved my bacon a couple of times. You may think $5 a month is a lot (you can get a discount for buying 1 or 3 years in advance), but when you are scrambling to find that one super-important file, (you know the one), you may just thank your lucky stars that you Mozied on home.

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