Tech Tuesday: Backing up Your Files

With all of the photos I've been taking and images that I use for my blog, my hard drive is getting overloaded with stuff. It's a bit frightening, thinking that if my computer crashes, all of those images will evaporate into the guts of this laptop. Not so worried about the blog stuff, but I can't bear to imagine my little cutie's childhood photos disappearing! I'm terrible about printing out hard copies of the photos, but that's another story.

I recently starting using an online backup tool called Mozy (and before you think this may be a review post, it isn't! I just really like this service). You install the program on your computer and it automatically backs up your files. It's free up to 2GB, and then it's $4.95 a month. So far I'm still on the free version, but I'm thinking that I'll upgrade when the time comes.
It's pretty simple to set up. When you register, you can select which kinds of files you want backed up, like Word documents, or photos, or even videos. The videos take up lots of space, so I opted to just do my images for now. If/when I upgrade, I'll backup the videos too, since when you pay, you get unlimited storage space. I've been using this for a month and have not been spammed or anything. Mozy is running in the background when I'm online, backing up my images every 20 minutes. To quote Ron Popeil of those really bad infomercials, you just set it and forget it!

I can see this being a great resource for a business too, if you don't have your own web server to back up your files on. So please, please, please take some time to back up your files. You just never know what might happen to your computer, and you'll be happy you spent the time to either burn a CD of your stuff or signed up for an online backup.