There are extreme advantages to having an online backup over a local one. What if your home or office gets broken into? What if there’s a fire or alien attack? If you have your backup onsite, you endanger it failing you in your hour of need. Mozy is offsite. You transfer your files over the internet after they have been backed up by a 448-bit encryption. I’m sure you can back up financial data and not worry one bit about it.

Mozy gives you a free 2 gig backup. Free. Seriously. They do have paid backup plans as well that are a lot more flexible, but for most people’s needs, the free version is just fine.

The sign up is easy:

1. Fill this form out
2. They send you a confirmation email
3. You click a link in the email
4. You download the software client
5. You install the software client
6. Walk through the wizard and tell it what you want backed up (usually documents and Quicken data, photos and music will be likely too much for the 2gig limit)
7. Start the backup and walk away (or do something that doesn’t require a lot of internet access)

The initial backup will take a long time, but after that, the daily/weekly backups will usually take less than 10 minutes because it’s only backing up new and changed files.

Paid versions get you versioning which basically gets you multiple versions of the documents you’re working on, in case you accidentally delete a few paragraphs or something, you can recover the better version of the document. Mozy is a good program and I encourage you to sign up for the FREE account today. It’s really easy and you’ll wish you had if your hard drive crashes!

Mozy.com

[Originally published on Off the Walt, Walt Snider's personal blog]