Offsite Backups are your Friend
I’ve been in the IT industry for a long time, but it’s usually not until you’ve lost some significant files or data that you truly become vigilant about your backup routine. In my case, it was my son triggering a format of an SD card containing 3 months of pictures that drove me to setup automated offsite backups of all of my data.
I work at a managed hosting company and I see far too many emails from coworkers about recovering data that they thought was backed up to external drives. I no longer support the idea of doing local backups to external drives. They are too prone to failure and the peace of mind with an offsite backup in a large redundant storage array is much more comforting.
With that said, where can you do this and how much will it cost? I personally use Mozy Home Backup, but have heard good things from Carbonite. Mozy will allow you up to 2GB of free backup space or you can pay the $4.95/month per computer and backup an unlimited amount of data. Backups run daily and you can restore files via the web or pay to have your files archived to DVD and mailed to you. I am currently backing up nearly 50GB of data.
Carbonite seems to be an identical product offering multi-year discounts where Mozy will let you pay monthly or give you a discount for paying for a year up front. Pricing is available here for Mozy and here for Carbonite.
Everyone should be doing this with their financial data, pictures, and video. The last thing you want is to have your computer stolen or your house burn down and lose all of your memories. I know that since I set this up, the only thing of value inside my home is my family. My data and memories are protected from everything but a massive disaster that affects my home as well as the datacenter where my data is backed up, which is not all that likely.
Sign up today and if you don’t, don’t ask me to recover your data for you when it’s gone.
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