After a hard drive crash a few months ago, I finally decided to invest in some backup insurance. I lost lots of data that I had spent a long time collecting, including a bunch of my old programming projects. When it’s something that you spent hours creating, you can’t just go and download the file again. And with the ever-increasing amount of digital pictures and videos that we’re accumulating as the family grows, the prospect of losing those irreplaceable files was beginning to worry me.

There are dozens if not hundreds of online backup companies out there who will help you take care of your data for you. I went searching for one that would work for me and wouldn’t break the bank. I found some that charged ridiculous amounts for their services. NovaStor charges $8,000 / year for 100 GB of backup space. Then there were other more reasonable options in the $200 / year range. That still seemed like a little more than I wanted to pay.

Luckily, I found Mozy. They offer several levels of service: MozyHome, MozyHome Free, and MozyPro. The free version offers you 2 GB of backup space, no strings attached. It’s a great option if you don’t have a large amount of data to backup. Maybe you want your tax returns, some Word documents, and a few spreadsheets backed up. MozyHome Free will work for you. And it’s free, which is a pretty good deal.

For me and my many files, 2 GB of space wasn’t enough. For $4.95 / month I signed up for Mozy Unlimited Backup. The rate is the same no matter how much data you use, though if you sign up for a year in advance, they knock the cost down a little bit. And there is no upper limit on your data size (I’m up to about 30 GB at this point). The data is encrypted so your information stays private because it’s only accessible by you.

All in all I’m very satisfied with the service. The most painful part is the initial uploading of all that data you’ve accumulated. Once that’s done, though, the updates are incremental and you can schedule them to run overnight so it doesn’t really impact you at all. At least, not until you lose a hard drive. I know I feel much safer knowing that my important files are backed up off-site.

Oh FYI, MozyPro is for businesses and the pricing scheme is higher. It’s not really for home users (unless you’re running Windows Server) though we are using that at work now, thanks to my satisfaction with Mozy at home.

UPDATE: Here are a couple of coupon codes that will get you a 10% discount for a Mozy Unlimited account. For a one- or two-year subscription, use OCTOBER.