Best Practices for Backing Up in a Paperless World

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If you are going to go paperless in your life, you best be backed up when you do. Since there's no paper backup filed away in case the hard drive fails, the building burns or the flood happens, 100% reliable backup becomes crucial.

In my quest to go paperless at home and in the office, I researched all kinds of alternatives from USB hard drives to tape to DVDs. Each had their problems with failures, difficulty of use, and practicality. For a while, I used two Maxtor 300 Gb USB hard drives. One would be online and backing up every night, the other stowed away safely in the fireproof computer media rated safe. Much to my amazement and disappointment, the drives continuously failed. After several returns and repalcements from Maxtor, I determined a) that these drives just aren't meant to be run for a week at a time every other week and b) Maxtor makes crappy drives, and finally c) perhaps this is the reason Maxtor is no more...

I also tried burning DVDs each week and storing them in the safe. This proved to be difficult to keep up with and time consuming. Backups in a paperless world are too important to do only weekly and they must be done religiously.

Then I discovered the world of online backps thanks to a friend and associate, Peter Toner, who turned me on to  Carbonite. I tried Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/) for a week and found it lacking. So I bit the bullet and did some serious research on these systems, and finally came upon Mozy (http://www.mozy.com/). All things considered, Mozy was the winner and I have been using it happily for several months now.

Mozy is inexpensive, effective and has lots of great features that other more expensive solutions do not. See their home page (http://www.mozy.com/) for a comparrison of other systems. It was easy to download, install and configure.

The Downside

One big drawback of Mozy is that it will NOT back up networked attached storage. I sure hope they add this feature in the future. I have all my music and media stored on a HP MV2020 (which I love) and Mozy won't back up this volume. As a work around, I put this data on a local drive on my PC just for backup purposes.

Another downside of Mozy (and any online system) is the speed and time the system takes to back up large files and collections. It took Mozy a week to backup my system initially. I have about 50 Gb backed up. After the initial backup, it's been a breeze to use and very fast, because it only needs to backup the files that have changed or been added. In my case, my MP3 library doesn't change very often, so there's no worries there.

Mozy allows you to access your files via the web, but this is more designed for restore operations than remote access. If you need remote access to your files, I'd suggest another solution, such as using a HP MV2020 or using a private FTP site.

All things considered, Mozy works great and I sleep better at night now!