I received a voicemail (via Callwave mind you) from my dad over the weekend that went something like this:
I seem to have deleted all of my contacts out of Outlook Express for letter's A - M... I'm wondering what I need to do to get these back. Call me when you get this.
I should have some kind of backup and recovery process in place for my family (I'm Brownsberger tech support), but I don't. I'd be happy if I had a fraction of what Scott's got in place. Until recently this stuff, while entirely necessary, was a big hassle - especially for the untechnical.
I've had a number of different Backup and Recovery strategies for my personal and professional data. I've done the Norton Ghost based approach, the home-grown .bat file approach, the put-everything-in-hosted-source-control approach, as well as a few others, but for the last few years I've been using a FolderShare + Backup Magic + external USB based storage approach at home to keep my home network backed up and as well as all of my satellite clients. It's worked well, but has it's shortcomings and limitations.
I've recently whiched to Mozy and plan to start moving my family over soon. Mozy, like Carbonite is one of the many online based backup and recovery services springing up. Now that broadband is so widely available and storage hardware is so cheap, there are very few computing users out there that can't have a rock solid B/R in place - geek or otherwise.
Mozy is exactly what a good online based B/R service should be - light, transparent, sturdy, and cheap. In a nutshell it's a system tray application that runs in the background of your Windows session
You configure Mozy and tell it what you want it to monitor and how it should work with your connection (trottled, when idle-only, etc.) and it does it's work behind the scenes.
The best part is for $150 I can have unlimited storage for 3 computers for a year - it's even cheaper with 2 and 3 year subscription. On one of my desktops at home, I've got Mozy backing up everything - ~70GB for MP3's, docs, code, etc.
My Mozy account if available directly from Windows Explorer with Mozy's virtual drive:
Beauty! Exactly what I want. Is never having to think about the what-if's with computing disaster worth $150? Ab-so-lute-ly... it's probably worth 10x that in my book.
Dear Reader,
If you ever loose a byte of data again, and can't get it back if you want to, just remember... you consciously chose not to purchase this service and you therefore have waived all rights to complain.