Mozy Online Backup review

I've tried many (too numerous to count) online backup solutions. I found most of them were either too confusing to set up, or didn't give me the options I specifically needed. Mozy is neither confusing, nor lacking in options.

As I've mentioned above, it comes in both free and paid-for flavours. The free account gives you 2Gb of storage (very generous for a free account). If you need more storage, you can opt to pay according to how much you require.

The interface is simplicity itself. You specify which directories/files you want backed up, and Mozy backs that data up securely offline at regular intervals. It only backs up the changes since the last backup (with versioning), keeping network traffic to a minimum.

I'm an avid photographer. I'm also paranoid about losing my images, so, once I've copied the images off the camera, I immediately back them up to my server. Mozy sits on my server and watches the directory I've backed my images up in and, when it gets some new images, it sends them off to be backed up online. Simplicity itself and it provides a nice warm fuzzy feeling knowing my treasured images are safely backed up in multiple locations.

If the worst happens and, say, your dog eats your hard drive, simply log on to your Mozy account via their home page and select the files you need to restore. The free account lets you do 4 restores per month, which should be sufficient unless your dog has an insatiable appetite for hard drives. It really is as simple as that. I've had to do a restore only once for real so far, and did so once before that to test it would actually work, and it's all flawless.

You can add multiple computers to one account. I have both my server and my laptop on a single account. On your account page on their web site, you can simply select the computer you wish to restore data from.

This really is a very simple "fire and forget" setup. Nobody likes backing up. Quite frankly, it's boring, so the job needs to be very simple and require as little effort as possible, for both backing up and restoring the data. Mozy excels in both areas.