Monday, October 22, 2007

Helpful: Backup your data

We have about 50 GB of music, movies, etc. in our iTunes catalog. That's hundreds of CDs from high school and college, hundreds of downloaded albums, podcasts, speeches, and videos of our cat. We had them all stored on an external hard drive, which we bought about 4 years ago.

Last Monday, the external hard drive crashed. It's worthless, and the data is irretrievable from the drive.

But there's a happy ending to this story.

A month ago after reading a series on Lifehacker, Cindy and I talked about our backup situation, and I signed us up for Mozy, an online backup service that charges $55/yr. for unlimited storage. Once I signed up, I selected the music drive and copied all of the files to the Mozy server. It took two weeks for the full backup, but once it was done, it automatically updated the backup whenever we added new music or files.

After the crash, I bought a new drive, selected the music files on Mozy, and started to upload them back to the new drive. It will take two weeks for the full transfer, but that is a short time to wait considering the vast amount of music on the line.

Important data must be in at least two places to be safe, and preferably, one of those places should not be in your house. Whether you have Mac or PC, Mozy is a great solution.

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