In my opinion the only thing more important than protecting your mobile office’s main component, you computer, from viruses, hackers and spyware is protecting against data loss. Well, it’s at least of equal importance. I myself am a big fan of redundancy. Meaning I back up to more than one location and, until a year or so ago, I did it all manually. I’d back up my entire C: drive, as well as my Network Attached Storage Drive (NAS), to a 500GB USB drive. I backed up the USB drive to my D: drive and I burned a weekly DVD back up of irreplaceable files like family pictures, financial and business documents which I then copied and stored 1 copy at work and 1 copy at my sister’s house. You might say I’m paranoid, or even obsessive-compulsive, but if you’ve ever lost important or irreplaceable files you can probably identify with that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize they’re gone forever. I make every attempt to maintain a paperless office and I deal almost strictly in digital files nowadays… business documents, tax records, family photos and videos, music, movies… all digital. I have to say it frees up a lot of space around the house but there are major caveats, like hard disk failure and system corruption, and there’s no telling when they’ll strike.
Mozy Progress
About a year ago, maybe more, I started researching and experimenting with online backup systems. I felt the only way for true peace of mind was to have a backup in a completely different geographical location. After trying a few I settled on Mozy because of the price and ease of use. Their service is, by far, the easiest I’ve tried. Literally all I did was install the software and Mozy went to work backing up my files. It took a few days for the initial backup after which I could count on automatic incremental backups to keep my data safe. I still do local backups, but no more burning and copying DVDs. Now I can sleep at night knowing that even if my house burned down, there was a meltdown at work and my sister’s house got struck by a meteor all in one night, my data would still be safe in the Mozy data center.