Backup Your PC/MAC !

Backup Your Files. Back Them Up. Perform Backups.

That is the message. Do you backup your computer files?

If a disaster (fire, flood, earthquake, tornado) affected your home or business
where are your backup files?

If they were in the same location as your computer, you may
have lost ALL of your data. What about those tax returns? Photos of the family. Financial records....

Do I need to say more?

You have a few choices for backups.

You can backup to media yourself, and lock the media somewhere outside of where the disaster might hit (another town?). You need to remember to keep backing up your data. If you are a business, you need to do that every day. For your home, you can probably get by about once a week.

Will You Remember? How much will it cost you to send the media to the "safe house" and maintain the storage?

I think the best way is a set it, and forget it approach.

There are several online backup services available.Mozy, Idrive, and Carbonite are the ones most people know about.

These services provide different plans, depending on your needs. They all have trials, so see which one works best for you. Mozy and Idrive have a free limited amount of storage if you don't want to spend the money. I have 14GB free storage with IDRIVE.

Idrive allows you to search for backed up files, and even choose a version based on when it was backed up. This is the best backup solution. It integrates into windows with a plug in. The backup with iDrive is fast - the fastest of all the online backups I have tried. This is the clear winner!

I found Mozy a little difficult to work with. If you mark all your files for backup, it will start. If your computer restarts for any reason, you need to start all over. So for this, you need to add directories (folders) a few at a time. I also found that if I reformatted my hard drive for any reason, my old backups would not be listed on Mozy. Maybe if you recovered files before you install mozy on your new drive, it may work. Support was not of any help. I also had my Mozy backups say I had 10gb backed up, when 15 minutes before it was over 50GB. I just can;t trust that my files will be there when I need them with Mozy.

Carbonite - Is good if you have a single system disk you want backed up. You cannot backup external drives (Hard Drives, USB Sticks, Memory Cards) unless you copy it to your system drive, back it up, and then optionally delete it. A very serious problem in my opinion. It can take several weeks to backup your files due to the low upload speed.


With these services, you run a program in the background of your computer. Every once in a while (you can usually set it to go every so often, and some even run almost continuously), and that is it.

An important thing to verify is that your data is transferred over a secure connection!