Are you a loser when it comes to protecting your files? Use an online backup solution!
The accident where I lost all my personal files
Last Christmas I had a disk crash on my job laptop. Like most companies we’re not allowed to store client data on our PCs, I had that stuffed away in repositories and project servers. But stupid me had saved quite a lot of personal documents in a local folder. Since my computer uses an encrypted disc, restore was never an option… ; (
OK, nothing left to do but realizing that my computer will return from Poland (HP’s European service center is located in Poland) without my loved ones…bye-bye…
Just a sad dog, I don’t know him...
What about all my photos at home?
That one accident got me thinking of my PC at home, with thousands of irreplaceable photos, Family videos, Hobby project etc on it. What if one of the disc crashes on that one? All our photos will be gone!! Well, not all of course, I’ve made some CD backups during the years, but none for the last six months... scary thought, these photos of my kids growing up are actually irreplaceable!
OK, I needed an automatic “fire-and-forget” solution, I know myself too well – if I have to remember it I’m going to forget it… that’s the raw truth…
I investigated external hard drives, plug’n’play backup boxes, DVD burning and online services. The external drives felt a bit insecure, viruses will reach those too. The boxes costs a fortune, DVD burning will be forgotten so I settled for an online service.
The final solution
I did a whole lot of research browsing and looked at most of the different backup providers, or at least the ones Google led me to. My criteria was:
- Affordable (low) price
- No storage limit
- Reliability, who wants their files secured by a company that might be out of business in a year or two?
- Simplicity, like I said above, if I have to remember it, I’m going to forget it…
The provider I choose for the winner was Mozy, a company owned by EMC (You know the global company that makes the ECM system Documentum). They charge $4.95 / month for an unlimited storage and everything is handled by a small application that sits in your task bar and waits for a convenient time to run next backup (configurable). Currently I’ve uploaded about 30 GB of my precious files to safety on Mozy’s encrypted servers…
Mozy even has a free service limited to 2 GB storage that you can increase by referring your friends to Mozy. BTW, the free service was a perfect option for my private files on my work computer ; )
No one gets it (besides my own brother)
OK, now I felt that I just had to warn all my friends from making the same mistakes I did. By not having a proper backup solution I risked loosing many of my photos so I wrote a short mail and sent it to 30 of my friends just to inform them about my finding and gain some extra space in my free account, of course ;).
Guess what? Only one person signed up and it was my brother, although I know for sure that none of the rest had a satisfactory backup solution!?
How come?
Are they just as stubborn and ignorant as I am? I guess so... ; )
Here’s a link for you if you would like to try Mozy for free (and give me some more space as well) ;)
(Select MozyHome for home/personal usage, and MozyPro for your company)
// ; ) Kalle
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