[MudDog]

I started with a Commodore 64 (ahh, the good old days) and have been in IT management for the last 21 years.

At work we always had RAID on our Unix and Windows based servers and tape backups. I would not trust RAID alone, as I've seen numerous RAID Controllers fail that have caused the entire array to become corrupt (and these are high-end RAID controllers).

For personsal data, I started with CD's, then when that became unmanageable switched to DVD's and then when that became unmanageable switched to a Xiemta network disk that was mirrored.

The problem with the Xiemta or a USB drive is convenience. If the data is important, it should always be off-site. What if there is a fire and you are not home at the time?

With it needing to be off-site, how often are you going to go get it, bring it home and refresh your backup and take it off-site again?


A few years ago I switched to online backup. There are a lot of offerings with mozy and carbonite being the dominate players.

I choose mozy.com and since then they were acquired by EMC (a MAJOR player in the storage market) - so I don't think they are going anywhere and being a public company they have SaS70 and ISO Certifications on their data center operations.

You choose what folders you want to backup up and it automatically does it in the background when your computer is idle. The data is encrypted with up to 256 bit blowfish encryption (most financial sites only use 128 bit encrpyption).

I have over 100Gb of photos, documents and music backed up.

Pricing is reasonable ($5.99/month for 50Gb, $9.99 for 125Gb...with up to 4 months free depending on contract duration) and it's convenient - I don't have to do anything to keep it current.

It also support versioning....If I had a 500 page book and opened it to write the ending credits and in the process deleted pages 200-250 and saved it that way, mozy keeps several prior versions (under windows, right click the file, select mozy restore and then select which version I want to restore).

If you're just copying files to USB drive or Flash drive without keeping multiple versions, the file may become corrupt, infected with a virus or you may do something to the file (like delete 50 pages) without knowing it...without versioning, you've lost data.