2GB Backup Free! With Mozy Home Edition. No setup fee, no credit card, no monthly payments, no expiration!



You may think it will never happen to you, but think again, as 1 out of 10 hard drives crash on average. It could cost you anywhere from $300 to more than $7500 to recover your critical data. Backing up your critical files is like insuring your home in the event of a disaster.

Of course, local backup isn’t enough. To protect your data against fire, lightning, theft, or other disasters, you want to backup your data to a remote server over the Internet. Mozy Home offer affordable unlimited server space and utilities that quietly back up your data in the background while you work. Mozy offers for free up to 2GB of storage.

Mozy’s big selling point for me is a robust backup client with features that are customized for online backups. The Mozy wizard walks you through creating backup sets, where you can choose to back up certain types of data, such as word processing documents, photos or e-mail contacts. You can also directly select particular drives and folders.

You can also choose a schedule for backups, or let Mozy handle it automatically. If you go the automatic route you can set parameters such as ‘don’t back up if the CPU is more than X percent busy.

The best option is one that allows for throttling backup traffic so that it doesn’t bog down your connection. You can adjust the throttle during an ongoing backup as well.

To restore files you can right-click a backed-up file (to restore a previous version), select files or folders in the Mozy client, browse through the ‘MozyHome Remote Backup’ folder in Windows Explorer, or use the Web interface. You’ll need to wait for Mozy to create a zip file for your restored files if you use the Web interface; the other three options allow for immediately restoring files or folders to their original place or a destination of your choosing.

I think $5 a month for an easy, unlimited backup is a sweet deal.