Computer Troubleshooting

(Probably) the best solution for keeping your data safe (PC and Mac)

Can you imagine losing your documents, photos, music, emails, projects, passwords? Are you ready for it? I am not. Backing up your precious data, is just like having insurance, (it’s not very exciting but extremely critical). All computers and their parts are subject to failure. All hard drives will inevitably crash one way or another (corruption, viruses, mechanical failures, mistakes, etc).

I am having a serious problem wth my data on my computer. I have an imac and a drobo 2 system with three har drives on it connected with firewire. I did the mistake to take the firewire cable off without unmount it and used it with my macbook pro. When I tried to cnnect it back to my imacv i got a message saying the disk you inserted is not readable with this computer and had three choices (…) i would really appreciate if someone can help. Please someone help..i lost everything!

No more nightmares

What is the solution? Online backup with Mozy. It is an automatic remote backup service for Windows and Macs. You schedule Mozy to do backups of whatever data you select and it will perform incremental backups (meaning only changes are updated) so backups are fast and you can easily rollback to any prior backup.
The nice thing about Mozy is that they offer a free subscription for anything less than 2GB of storage, so you can try them out and not have to pay anything for it. I knew right away that I would need to backup more than that so I went with the $4.95/mo. unlimited plan right from the start (I had about 60GB that I needed to backup - lots of documents photos). Practically speaking, unlimited is actually limited by your connection and the time it takes to complete.

Easy of use

The Mozy configuration interface is powerful yet easy to use. You can set it either to backup folders or files. There are also backup sets that are prebuilt i.e. Music, Firefox and IE Favorites, Financial Data, Photos, Spreadsheets and Databases, Word Documents etc.

Automatic and scheduled backups

Backups cheduling feature is very fexible. You can set the backups to occur within a range,parameters, or at specifc times.

You can select to temporarily suspend automatic and scheduled backups. To do that you can suspend MozyHome backups from your system tray. To activate the feature, rightclick the program icon in your system tray, then click Suspend. Mozy does not perform any backups until you deselect the Suspend option.

Selecting Your Backup Speed

Mozy allows you to select the speed of your backups. You can select either to have faster backups or better performance for your computer.

Bandwidth Throttling

Imagine a set of two power lines running to and from your house, but information (for example, word processing fles, images, etc.) is fowing through the lines, not power. One line is only for uploading to the Internet (email, etc.), while the other is only for downloads (incoming email, photos, torrents, etc.). Your Internet provider supplies your information lines and determines the size of those lines. Only so much data can fow through them at a time. During some parts of the day (or always, depending on your service), you might need Mozy to use less of your upload bandwidth so other higher priority services can use it. This is called throttling. The program allows you to customize your backup throttle so that you don’t have to tie up your information lines
when you need them the most.

Accessing to your files

So having a backup is great but what’s the use if you can’t access it! Mozy allows several different ways to access your data and all of these ways allow you to access any of your previous backups — not just the latest one. One way is to use their Windows explorer restore feature. You can either open your Mozy drive directly from My Computer or you can right-click in any directory and select which files you wish to restore.

One way is to login through their website which you can do from any machine. In the event of a catastrophic computer failure or loss, a situation where the Mozy client is not available, you can restore files using MozyHome Web Restore -   you can select the files you want Mozy will prepare a zip file of the requested files for you to download.

Good service = happy user

If you’re looking for an automatic low-maintenance way to keep your files backed up remotely, Mozy is great option and offers a completely free option for backing up to 2GB of data and a $5/month plan for unlimited backups.

Check it out: http://www.mozy.com

Tags: backup