Backing up your data on hard drives connected to your computer isn't the only option out there for those of us who've learned that it's better to shell out a few bucks to secure the things that matter than risk losing them.
In the past few years, consumers and businesses have begun to discover the benefits of storing your data in the cloud - basically uploading your files and folders - over the Internet to a server farm.
Along with the networked hard drives and portable drives I reviewed for this package, I also tried out MozyHome, an online backup and restore service by Mozy, which is owned by EMC Corp., which also owns Iomega.
As a pure backup and security option, choosing a service like Mozy (whose main competitor is Carbonite) is a smart move. While backing up on an attached hard drive is great, hard drives have been known to fail. They fall off a desk and smash on the floor, sit in spilled Coke overnight or get up and walk away with the rest of the valuables in your house. Fire, flood and tornadoes have also been known to turn connected backup drives into paper weights.
In the cloud, though, you send your data up and that's it. During setup you determine what level of encryption to use - strong or stronger - and beam it up via a 128-bit SSL connection, which is the same typed used in online banking. Mozy says customer and business data is distributed across thousands of disks with redundancies built in and their data centres are build on base isolators than can sway six feet in diameter in case of an earthquake. And while I suppose Mozy's server farm is as likely to be struck by a meteor as your house is (if that happens you still have the files on your computer), the likelihood of a meteor crashing down in both places at the same time is remote. (If it does happen, then that indicates a somewhat higher level of disaster from which only Ben Affleck can save us.)
After downloading and installing MozyHome on my PC, it scanned my drives and gave me the option of selecting whole drives or specific folders to back up. Mozy runs automatically in the background, meaning after choosing the disks and folders I didn't have to worry about any kind of maintenance or fiddling. Mozy places a shortcut in My Computer that lets you access or restore any accidentally deleted files. After the initial backup, only new or changed portions of files are backed up.
Mozy offers a few different packages. Anyone can sign up and try the service for free with a 2Gb limit but a MozyHome subscription, which costs $4.95 (U.S.) a month or $54.45 a year or $103.95 for a two-year package, comes with unlimited storage.
However, there's a catch to the whole unlimited storage thing. Depending on how much data you're securing, it could takes weeks to complete the initial backup and may blow your ISP bandwidth cap out of the water.
On my 300-Gigabyte C drive and 500Gb D drive I had a total of about 450 gigs of data. I elected to back up 130Gb of my total, including images, music and some video files, e-mail, documents and bookmarks. In all, it took more than three and a half weeks for the initial upload to complete. And even though I purposefully started the process with a week and a half left in June, I went over the 95Gb of allotted monthly bandwidth that comes with my service plan in June and again in July. While it only cost me a few dollars in June, this month I've already exceeded my cap and expect Rogers to add another $25 to my bill.
Still, subsequent months will prove less bandwidth-intensive and less time-consuming because only new or changed portions of files are backed up. However, anyone with a torrent habit might want to be a little selective with backing up every downloaded video because the stress that'll put on a bandwidth cap could be severe. Not only will the downloading and seeding eat up bandwidth but sending the data into the cloud will double the amount used.
Overall, once the initial phase was complete, Mozy (or for that matter Carbonite - although I have not tried the service, other reviews say it matches up well with Mozy) strikes me as the safest backup option out there.