MOZY — Free On-line Backup for Your Home PC

  What do you use your home pc for? Do you have tons of contacts in Outlook including hard-to-get cell phone numbers? Store any important financial documents? Been collecting digital photos or MP3’s over the years? Now let’s say, boom!, your hard drive crashes and everything is gone.

  For businesses, tape backup is still the best means to back up. Tape is so good because a copy of the backup can easily be kept off-site from the original data in the event of a natural disaster.

  Now there is an on-line internet backup service primarily geared toward home users that works well and believe it or not, is free. Well, at least for the first 2 GB of data. Check it out at http://mozy.com. What you’ll find is that you simply need to click on “Mozy Home” then “Mozy Home Free”, sign up (enter ref code Y3KCEK), download and install the client on your pc, and do your initial backup which will take several hours but after that backups generally only take 10 minutes or less. All files are encrypted and the company claims that you are the only one that can access them.

  There are many configuration settings in Mozy where you can have it backing up in the background automatically or you do it manually. If on a manual schedule, the program will remind you if you haven’t backed up in a few days.

  You have a full windows-like tree structure to use to select what is to get backed up. If you are well organized and consistently store your documents in one folder structure then you will be sure not to miss things. Just remember that the file used to store email, contacts, appointments, etc. for Outlook ends in ‘.pst’ and probably is not in the same place as the rest of your documents.

  If you need to restore, you can either specify the files you want restored and then download them, or for a nominal fee have all files burned onto a DVD and sent to you via Fedex.

  Did we mention that the service is free? What are you waiting for?