There are a lot of backup services out there on the internet so I thought I’d do a quick writeup of my favorite. Here are 10 reasons why you should use Mozy Unlimited Backup for your computer backups.
- Ease of use – Their software is easy to setup. After the inital setup, there is zero effort required by you for your backups to function. If you do need to restore a single file, it’s easy: just browse to it in your backup list and restore it. If you need to restore all of your files, you can grab a zip file of all your files from their website.
- Cost – If you have less than 2GB of files to backup, the service is free. From 2GB and up, the service is $4.95/month. That’s right, for $4.95/month, you can backup unlimited files (on a single computer.)
- Cross platform – Works on both Windows and Mac (and I heard they’ll have a Linux version someday, but I’m not getting my hopes up.)
- Security – All communication is done over SSL (just like your banking websites.) In addition to that, your files are encrypted prior to being sent over the internet (and are stored encrypted.) If you’re extra paranoid like me, you can even use your own key to encrypt the files. But beware if you use your own key it will be required to restore files – even Mozy won’t be able to help you restore files without your key.
- Past file versions – Let’s say you butchered some changes to a file and wanted to get back the version you had 3 days ago. With Mozy you can do that!
- Doesn’t slow down your computer – The resources used by Mozy are small and you can custom configure them even further so that it will run when your computer is idle. I prefer to schedule backups to run in the middle of the night so they can use all of my internet bandwidth to get the backups done quickly (I leave my computers on all the time.)
- Block-level incremental backups – Don’t doze off at the techno-jargon. This is particularly useful if you are backing up your huge Outlook .pst file (or any larges file that you may have.) Any time you receive an email, that huge file is modified. Other online backup services will require that the entire file be uploaded during a backup. With Mozy only the changes to the file are uploaded, thus decreasing backup time and bandwidth usage.
- Durable company – Mozy is owned by a very large data storage company (EMC is worth approx.$20B.) They’re not going away any time soon.
- Your hard drive is going to die – When it comes to hard drives, failure isn’t a matter of if, but when. That external hard drive you’re using for backups right now is going to fail. If your house burns down, it will die a horrible death at the same time as the hard drive in your computer. You need your data backed up offsite.
- My mother uses it – She’s been using it for over a year now, and if Mozy is good enough for her, isn’t it good enough for you?
I just released another 
I’ve been using iFolder for a few years now and am now in the process of switching my desktop from SuSE 10.1 to Kubuntu Gutsy. I was a little saddened that I couldn’t find a native ifolder package for ubuntu, so I had to compile it myself.