I’ve decided there are a few products that I really should write about, that I don’t. Mozy, an online backup tool I use, is one of them. The reason I haven’t written about it before is frankly because I don’t think about it, because I don’t need to. It just works.

Everyone should backup, few people do. A proper backup strategy for a normal home user would consist of backing up absolutely everything to either a NAS or an external hard disk, and then backing up as much as possible to an offsite secure facility where your data will be held encrypted. In reality, the closest most people get to the above is a few CDs of data kept in a draw, burnt whenever someone remembers. That’s all I did, until I had a scare when I thought my laptop’s hard drive had died, and that I had lost all my work (in fact it had merely become unplugged). I now backup quite carefully.

Mozy is an important part of my new found responsible behavior. It sits on my desktop and my laptop, running in the background, doing a differential backup every few hours of the files and folders I have told it to, encrypting it first, sending it off to a data center. There is a free version, though that only gives you a 2GB storage quota.

Mozy’s success can be measured in the fact that I pay for the extra storage. I have a Dreamhost account with a total of 200GB of space, and as far as I can remember 1TB of bandwidth. I could backup to Dreamhost, but there is simply no easier way to do it than Mozy, so I pay the few dollars a month.

Sorry if that read like a press release! Although they do have an affiliate program I’m not part of it! I hope to do more features like that in the future; these sorts of products that work really well don’t tend to get much coverage, because, lets face it, who’s interested in backup tools until they lose their data!