ICON/Information Concepts 211 S 45th St Philadelphia PA 19104 215-349-6500 fax 215-349-6502 www.icodat.com email: alan@icodat.com

Hard disks don't crash often. Neither are computers stolen, destroyed by natural disasters, or left in taxicabs with any great frequency. But, when these sorts of things happen, the overwhelming majority of computer users have a disaster on their hands. Why? It's not just the money. But it's the files they've lost.

Yes, everybody knows files should be backed-up regularly on separate storage media. And you don't have to be a computer geek to at least have heard that the back-ups should be kept at a location other than that of the computer. But few people do it. And those that do never seem to have done it shortly enough before the trouble occurs.

There are now Internet services to which you can subscribe that back up your files automatically. The way they work is conceptually simple. When you register, you download a program that starts by taking an inventory of the word processing, data, photo, and other non-system files on your disk. Then they upload them to a remote secure server and encrypt them so they can only be retrieved by password access. Then, as you work, the program keeps track of the files you've created or modified, and at intervals of your choosing — for instance, hourly, if your prone to worry a lot — it accesses the server and stores everything new or changed. You don't have to do anything, with the possible exception of checking the "history" log once in a while for confidence that you're protected.

The problem until now has been that the back-up services are expensive.

Or, we thought so until we found out about MOZY. MOZY will back-up your first 2 gigabytes of files free. And the vast majority of individual users — even those with lots of files and photos, maybe even a little music and video — don't come close to needing this much capacity. (If you do exceed the 2 gigabyte level, you're not in trouble but you may have to switch to the fee-paid option; it's about $5 per month.)

This is a service whose benefits you hope you never have to use. But it's an offer you may regret refusing. And... it received a great review from Walter Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal (click here to read it).

Last updated 10.4.2008