Well, lots of reasons -

1. Hard drives have moving parts and if you saw one in action you would worry...a lot. Here is a short video of a disk with the cover off.

2. More often than not, the loss of data is caused by accidental deletion to make space for something else.

3. You send in your PC to be repaired or worked on and they trash your data. We see this one a lot

4. You call a company for support on a program and they trash your computer trying to fix it. HP seems to do this with HP printing software.

5. Your PC is stolen or lost. 

Read more for the 15 minute fix I promised you -

Still with me? Excellent!

I have taken the time and effort on behalf of our clients to stay on top of the backup strategy's that are available for both PC's and servers.

Here is the executive summary of my recommendations:

MOZY

•  For 1 or 2 Home or home office PC's I like MOZY as a solution because it is easy to install and affordable at $4.95 a month or $54.45 a year with one month free that will allow for up to 30 GB of storage. You can use the FREE version if you only want to back up a small number of files or directory's like your My Documents. The free version will only allow you to backup 2 GB of files.

• I also like MOZY because it allows you to schedule the backup times and also allows for the "throttling" of the bandwidth used. This is handy if you have Vonage or a VOIP phone and do not want all your upstream bandwidth completely used. The user interface is powerful and a tray icon alerts you if you have missed backups. 

Carbonite

• Carbonite is a little less featured than MOZY but still has the ability to get the job done. Carbonite still allows you to select directory's to be backed up and has a throttle feature like MOZY, but the options are much more limited compared to MOZY if you want a more granular backup based in file type rather than directory. Carbonite allows for unlimited data to be backed up so you have no limit other than your internet connections ability to upload the data. Carbonite is also cheaper, and if click on the link you can get 20% off. I paid $39.96 for the year. That is not even .10 cents a day.

You might wonder which one we use here at Eliminate Chaos. The answer is both. I use MOZY on my laptop for continuous backup of my data even when I am on the road and Carbonite on the server in conjunction with Symantec Backup Exec on the office PC's and servers. Carbonite's job is simply to get the information off site for us. Backup Exec does all the heavy lifting by consolidating the data in one place.

Both MOZY and Carbonite offer free trials of the software so if you are unsure, try them both but please do not try them at the same time.

So lets review, you took 5 minutes reading this and 5 downloading the software and 5 setting it up! Ask yourself what losing all your email, personal photos,  tax information and documents that can't be recreated is worth? You know your life will turn upside down if your PC crashes so please, eliminate some of your backup chaos and get it backed up. If you need help, we are also here to assist you. We can remote into any system and set up a backup system for you.

Happy Computing,

Robert Strasser
IT Strategist