We have all heard it said, “You should back up your data” and we have all also heard after that hard drive (or computer) crash that we always thought could never happen to us. I myself have been found guilty of this on more than one occasions. But I’m married now and my wife and I have our entire lives on my desktop PC. Everything from pictures of our daughter, wedding, and parties to important documents like scans of bills and other important documents are all on this volatile device called a hard drive. And if that goes out, well we would pretty much be out of luck. Rather we used to be out of luck. About 3 weeks ago I signed up for Mozy.com, an online backup storage service. Mozy.com is a reasonably priced, secure, and online remote backup solution. They offer four (4) pricing categories ranging from free (2 Gigabytes) to $9.95 a month (60 Gigabytes). I personally went with the $1.95 a month plan that gives me 5 gigabytes of backup space. More than enough for my photos and documents (and a couple of odds and ends). I also paid for a full years worth of the service so I’m good until at least then.

For this week’s How-To Technology article I’m going to show you, yep you guessed it, how to use Mozy to backup your life. First things first, click here, and sign up for an account. Once you have set up an account you will need to download their little application, don’t worry they kind of make you do it by dedicating a whole page of the sign up process to it. Next we will configure the application, this is done via the configuration screen in the Mozy Backup application. First you’ll be asked to type in a passphrase, something secure and only you will remember to encrypt your data. The data encryption is one of the best reasons to go with Mozy since even if someone was able to access your account, they probably won’t be able to access the data. After you have taken the steps Mozy requires to encrypt your data, the first screen you’ll see is the “Backup Sets” screen. This screen has a list of pre-configured backup sets. For example, from this screen you can set your Internet Explorer Favorites, Mozilla Firefox bookmarks, and all word processing documents with just a few simple clicks on checkboxes.

You might notice the little bar at the bottom that lets you know how much of your space you’ve used. As you check the checkboxes for the different items that quota bar will move accordingly ensuring you that you stay under your quota limit. Now you could just leave your backing up limited to the predefined backup sets. But if you are anything like me, you have different types of files spread out all over your hard drive. For this, Mozy has a “File System” tab in the configuration screen that lets you define what to backup by selecting individual folders.

As you can see from the image above, you can easily select the folders you want to specifically backup. By default though, Mozy hides important operating system folders from you because they do not recommend backing them up. But this removes the Program Files folder where some important stuff gets stored. There is an option on the “Options” tab that will eliminate this little issue.

Once you’ve got all this done, you are ready to set up your schedule. Mozy gives you two options for this. You can set it up to backup while your computer is in an idle state or you can set it up to back up at a specified time. As you can see in the screenshot below, I chose a specified time that’s late into the night when I am almost never on the computer.

Once you have a schedule, Mozy is ready to begin backing up your computer. The first backup is going to take a while depending on how much stuff you told it to backup (I backed up 2.3 gigabytes and it took 3 days) but once it’s backed up, Mozy will only back up the differences from that point forward. As each backup completes Mozy logs what was backed up and whether or not it was successful. And, if you guessed that they give you a way to see that information, you guessed correctly.

So hopefully now, you can backup your important files and keep them backed up. Once you have this done, your are that much better prepared for a data loss, and that is probably one of the most important things in this electronic age.

[Technorati Tag: Technology]
[Technorati Tag: Backups]
[Technorati Tag: Mozy]