Renton, WA

Now for the second installment of the Friday Freebie, my second-favorite freebie of all time. Mozy Online Backups.

The reason I love Mozy is that it is truly set-it and forget-it. I use my laptop for a home business, which makes backups even more critical, but all of us underestimate the importance of our files. Your email, those pictures you just took, and certainly your copy of Quicken. If your last backup was a month ago, that is not much better than no backup. What about the email you received yesterday about that thing you have to do, and do you want to re-enter a month’s worth of transactions into Quicken? I didn’t think so. Mozy can be set to backup daily, or whenever you computer is idle (based on your definition of idle). I don’t need to do anything, and I’ll never loose more than 24 hours worth of information. Data is well-encrypted, and if you would feel better about it, you can even choose your own encryption key.

Like most great web apps, they provide a free , limited version for light users, and a paid version for those who need it and are willing to pay for it. The free version allows you back up 2Gigs of data. This is enough for a typical person with email and a few documents, maybe a few pictures you haven’t yet permanently saved to DVD.

If you want or need unlimited backup, you can get it for the very reasonable price of $5/month (paid one year at a time).

I could sing the praises of Mozy for much longer than I have space in this blog. I have written some articles for Associated Content which go into more detail on How to Get the Most from Your Mozy Online Backups and the key difference between Backing Up Your Working Files and Archive Data. If you have used Mozy, or have another candidate for a future Friday Freebie, leave me a comment and let me know.