Computing PSA: Please Backup!

Greg here in a random fit of posting - and please excuse the blog spam. No cute pictures or anything else - just a public service announcement. As most of you know I work with computers most every day of my life and countless times people have lost valuable data. If I could convince people to change one single aspect of their computing lifestyle it would be to make sure you are taking regular backups! I see it as a two step process: 1) actually start backing up your important data and 2) make sure your data is recoverable [i.e. test your backups].

Well, about a year ago I signed up for a free online backup service (limited to 2GB of storage with the free account) and I have placed a variety of important word documents and other things under their care (but no pictures). Having used them for more than a year I can vouch for their reliability and the overall quality of the system. I have even restored some of my important documents at work, so they are certainly recoverable from about anywhere! As a side-note, in the last year I have used a cumulative 48MB of storage space (about 2% of my available space) so I think the free account has been well worth it - though you may only want to use it to backup documents to stay under the 2GB limit. Most backup software has very friendly options to help you select what you would like to backup.

The service I ultimately chose was none other than a locally operated Utah company: Mozy. My reasons for selecting them were really quite simple: Online, excellent encryption options, background updates each day (or set schedule), easy recovery. One of the more impressive features is they will even mail you recovery DVDs in the case of a disaster and you don't want to wait for all 300GB of photos, music and videos to restore over the internet.

Really I don't care what service you use, or how you do your backups - just please make sure they are being done! That being said, right now Mozy is running a special where if you sign up they will give you (and me - full disclosure) an extra half a gigabyte of storage FOR FREE. Please do yourself a favor and download and install Mozy today and start your online backup: http://mozy.com/?ref=L7HC85

Note: If it asks for a referral code, use L7HC85 - though just clicking the above link should work.