Backing up your data is a very wise thing to do. Hard drives fail, files and folders get deleted accidentally, and sometimes you just can’t remember where you put something any more. I recommend a two-layer backup plan. Your first layer is to have an external drive connected to your computer that runs a automated backup application. For Mac, Time Machine and Time Capsule are perfect; they work great together, look BEAUTIFUL (best recovery GUI ever!), and you can connect wirelessly. However, you may not want to shell out all that money ($300+) to get that Apple product.
In that case there are many external hard drives that would work. Here’s an example: the 1TB WD Home Studio is around $150 from Amazon comes with Firewire and USB2 connections, and includes an automated backup system designed for Macs. Both Time Capsule and the WD Studio are pretty much set-and-forget. If you need to recover your files, you mount the drive, browse to the folder, and copy it over. Easy enough.
But you may want to add a second layer to your backup plan. What happens if your external hard drive dies? Or, what happens if your house floods and you lose both your computer and backup hard drive? That’s where a secondary, “cloud-based” backup plan can really save you.
Mozy offers a free backup application with 2GB of space on their servers. You sign up for an account, download and install the program, select which files to backup (only important ones if you have more than 2GB of documents), and let it run in the background. It will automatically upload those documents and any changes to their server. Simple and free. If your house floods, you’ll still have a copy of the documents stored off-site with Mozy.
There are some draw-backs to Mozy though. Mozy only keeps the last 30 days of your documents backed up. So, if you find out 2 month later that a version of a needed file you changed isn’t on your first layer of backups (the external hard drive), you can’t get it from Mozy either. Also, Mozy’s recovery of files is a bit of a pain. You basically have to request which files you want recovered, and then wait (sometimes many hours) until you get an email with the link to download them.
There are other solutions like Mozy available, most of them for a yearly fee of under $100 that are less cumbersome on recovery, including Crashplan (recently discussed on HMAUS listserv), Carbonite, and Jungledisk. If you are serious about adding an in-the-clouds kind of backup layer, or have files you absolutely can not live without, then these paid services are a good solution.
However, for a FREE, automated, off-site, secondary backup, Mozy is so simple and easy to have running, it may be just right.
Posted under Reviews
This post was written by markmcmahon on March 31, 2009
