Monday, May 15, 2006

Free, Automatic, Encrypted Backup with Mozy


I used to live in fear that my computer would crash. It contains so much that I wouldn't want to lose. Having already lived through the trauma of lost business accounts, family photos, work documents, and crucial emails, and endured the pain of: "Daaaaaad! It took me hours to download all that music!" I was determined not to go through that again.

"Buy a backup disk," I hear you say. I did. Guess what? It worked for a while and then crashed too.

And then, I stumbled across Mozy. Mozy is a great free little program that you can download and configure to back-up whenever you want it to. You get an initial 2GB of free space (and can purchase more at a reasonable price if you need to in the future). All data is encrypted before being backed up then delivered to the Mozy servers via a secure connection. It works quietly and efficiently in the background protecting what you value.

The initial configuration is very helpful (much more helpful than my backup disk that cost me over £100). You simply select either particular files or folders, or, more intuitively, the kind of files that you want to backup - selecting from types including email, accounts, documents, presentations, spreadsheets & databases etc.

And it works. Why not find out more, or try it for free?

One of my friends said that after she had downloaded Mozy, it wouldn't initially connect. We soon worked out that this was due to Norton, not Mozy. We soon got Norton to recognise Mozy (Mozy has a FAQ answer explaining how) and now she knows her data is secure too. And, OK, depending on your internet connection, the initial saving of data may take a bit of time, but once that is complete, backups usually only take seconds, as only new or changed data has to be backed-up.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're using this at work to backup our files. Thanks for the suggestion. It's brilliant!

Anonymous said...

I tried it today. Thanks for the suggestion - especially the warning about Norton. After an initial problem I soon got it working. Love it already.