Thursday, May 28, 2009

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Online Computer Backup

Not backing up your computer can be a costly mistake. If your computer crashed today would you still have your important document accessible? Most people to not backup their computers or if they do it is not on a regular basis. Backing up your computer used to be a tedious task involving tapes or lots of disks.

Today there are easy ways to backup your computer online. The first one I am featuring today is called Mozy. Mozy is a small program that runs on your computer all the time. When you download it, you set it to watch certain spots on your drive. When you add files to these spots Mozy sees it and copies those files to Mozy's secured servers over the internet. When, and yes it is when, your computer crashes you can just download Mozy again and download all your data back onto your machine when it is fixed. Mozy costs just $4.95 a month for unlimited data backup!

Another program called Elephant Drive exists. Elephant Drive is a very similar backup program to Mozy. A small client application runs on your computer keeping track of your important files. When a file is changed or created the application backs up the file to Elephant Drive servers. It is important to note that both Elephant Drive and Mozy use what is called differential backups, meaning if a file is changed only the changed part is backed up. This saves space and time when backing up your data. Pricing is similar to Mozy.

The final application featured is called Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk performs the same tasks as the other programs listed, backing up your computer, but it is much more advanced. Jungle Disk hooks into the Amazon S3 service, which is a global network of storage servers. It is more complicated to setup than the other two but it can end up cheaper for certain backup circumstances. Pricing starts at $2 a month for the program plus $0.15 per gigabyte for storage on Amazon's servers.

Using a program to backup your computer is an easy, inexpensive insurance policy for your data. Start backing up your computer now to avoid and heartache.