Since I spend a lot of my life working with computers, you’d expect that I know a lot about backing up. I’m always telling people about how important it is to protect their digital belongings, and yet I’ve got virtually no backup system in place! I’m not alone either, with most people I know being just as ignorant as I am. However data loss does happen, and I’m sure David Berlind’s story will be worryingly familiar to a number of people.

This morning, I woke up to hell that’s worse than the blue screen of death: a hung system. You know the type: mouse frozen, unresponsive keyboard… Today, the situation got worse because now, the system won’t boot either. It booted fine yesterday. I get to the Windows splash screen, but after that, something goes terribly wrong and the hard drive, which sounds normal up until a point, starts to make a rhythmic grinding noise as though it’s trying to get at something it just can’t get at.

I’ve had a hard drive or two fail in my time (stupid good for nothing lightning!), so I am aware of the situation. Every year or so I have copied some or my important files around to other computers on my home network. Also I’ve recently bought a portable hard drive that lives on top of my server, and I store another copy of my files on there. All in all, it’s pretty inadequate. I’m left completely unprotected, losing all of my precious files in the event of fire, meteorite, or theft.

So as my blog starts to take shape, I thought it was about time I looked into implementing some sort of real backup system. I don’t need anything fancy, and I’ve come up with this list of requirements:

• Cheap – I don’t like wasting money.
• Simple – If I have to constantly manage the backup then I’m not going to do it.
• Automatic – Same as above. I’m too lazy to think about backing up, let alone click a button to do it.
• Offsite – If the next asteroid near Earth takes out my house, my photos will still be safe.
• Versioned – Sure I can restore a deleted file, but what happens if I delete the contents and save it? (rhetorical)

I’ve been an avid listener of TWIT for a while now, and if you’ve ever heard Leo Laporte open his mouth you’d know about Carbonite. It’s an offsite backup service that automatically uploads your selected files and folders to their servers distributed across multiple data centres. I thought that I should give it a go, so I signed up for the 30 day free trial.

Yeah mmm it was ok. I did everything that I wanted it to I guess. There was just some little things that annoyed me, and for about $6 a month it didn’t seem worth it. One of the things that bugged me was the user interface. Mainly based around shell integration, the look and feel seemed almost hacked together and unfriendly. Also, Carbonite has a “feature” (probably designed to save storage space on the server) that stops videos as well as system style files from being backed up by default. To a developer like me, system and configuration files are really important, and it was too much effort manually selecting them all. Goodbye Carbonite!

I generally liked the idea behind Carbonite, just not the implementation. Using the Google comparison trick I checked out the competition.

Hello Mozy! And welcome to the family! Mozy was exactly what I was looking for, and has none of the things I complained about with Carbonite. These are the things that I like:

• The interface is clean and simple, which makes it easy to select the folders you want backed up.
• Every file type is backed up automatically, with no exceptions.
• It even backs up open and locked files like Outlook PST files!
• Every fixed disk in your computer can be backed up.
• 30 days of version history.
• Backups are scheduled incrementally, and only when the computer is in low use.
• Multiple restore options, including ordering your data on a DVD!

So for approximately the same price (US$4.95 a month), I get unlimited storage space with all of these features! In comparison it seems much cheaper. For those of you who think they don’t really have enough data to warrant the cost, Mozy offers a free version with 2GB storage. If you need a little more space, then every 2 friends you refer gives you another gigabyte of space.

I’m sleeping much better at night knowing my precious 1′s and 0′s are floating around safe in the cloud. It doesn’t complete my system as only my server is backed up, but that’s where most of my data lives. The next step is to use another third-party tool to back up my other machines onto a network share (yes that’s supported!), but all in good time. So next time you hear the click of death, will you be crying, or sighing with relief that you signed up with Mozy?