Backups

2007 has been a weird year for me already from a technology standpoint. In the past two weeks I have come to know and love both the Flickr picture service as well as the del.icio.us online bookmarking tool. These are sites that have been around for quite a while and most of my co-workers at least would probably be a little surprised to find out that I have just started using them now.

Usually in January (and hopefully a couple of times a year), I try to backup all of the files on my computer to CD. However with all of the media I have gathered over the past couple of years (pictures, music, etc), I certainly can't fit it all onto one CD and don't want to spend the time or effort backing files up to multiple CDs.

In one of those forehead slapping moments, I realized there was bound to be a service out there that would backup some, if not all of my data for free. A quick "free online backup" search on Google led me to Mozy. Mozy allows you to securely backup data on your computer in a secure and relatively painless fashion. You just download their software, tell it what you want backed up and how often you want it backed up. You can backup data once a day, once a week, etc or just whenever your computer is idle. You get up to 2 GB of storage free and unlimited storage is only $4.95 a month.

I'll definitely need to use the pay service to back up my music and photos but am already backing up my financial data using the free service as we speak.