Mozy Online Backup: Free. Automatic. Secure.

Mozy Online Backup: Free. Automatic. Secure.

I've seen quite a few online backup ideas - first there's your own FTP storage on a nice big web host such as Dreamhost, but that requires you to do things manually and can be cumbersome. Dreamhost are also less than reliable these days.

For those on the Mac platform there's .Mac, but it's expensive.

If you have a gmail (cough, sorry, Googlemail) account there's gDrive as a free answer, but it's a bit "hacky" and you'll never know if Google might object and put a stop to it. Again you would need some software or personal routine for actually backing up your files.

Enter Mozy. Seems great! You get 2GB of free storage for your online backups, and software that automatically does routine online backups for you. The first one might be big, but after that it does incremental backups each time and so becomes less noticable. Your data is also encrypted, so nobody at Mozy will go er, mozying around your data, even if they wanted to. All this for free - it's good stuff!

Don't count on using it for sharing files (use Rapidshare or your own FTP for that) - it's purely for backup, and the software and general structure of the system tries to ensure this remains the case. In my opinion this is fine, it keeps the free version of the service speedy and reliable as it doesn't have the entire internet's worth of software/movie pirates piling onto it.

If you're on ADSL like me, then the prospect of uploading more than 2GB in your *lifetime* should send shivers down your spine, because uploads on ADSL are slow and drastically affect the line's performance. I think 2GB will more than suffice for most of my really important stuff such as documents, email and bookmarks. However you can get unlimited storage for $4.95/month if you feel the need.

It supports the Mac now too, which is great as I use both - and the site keeps track of each machine individually, including when you last backed it up.

One other thing - you can throttle the bandwidth so that it doesn't hammer your connection, and even choose the times in which the throttle applies (I went for 16:00 to 03:00 when we're all usually busy with the internet at home)

The only remaining problem is photos. A good photography session can bring back 2GB worth of raw files (digital negatives if you prefer), which can be worth keeping especially if you get some really high quality shots. Some photos can be priceless to yourself, even if they're worthless to others. I'm open to suggestions for offline backup solutions here, but I think a DAT drive (something like a DDS4 which is 20GB uncompressed) would be a decent answer - £50 from eBay, tapes are £2-4 each, and 20GB is enough for quite a few photos - even in raw format. The tapes are small, just sling one in your bag and store it in your drawer at work.