How to Backup your PC Online - Unpublished Indian Express Article

How to Backup your PC Online

A few days back, one of my accountants created havoc in the office, it was the next day to christmas from what I recall, the problem was, he was getting ready to file the Quarterly Tax Returns that we have to file, and he came with a sad looking face to me, I just lost all our Accounting Data, expecting that he will get a shouting from me, on how, why, aisa kyon karte ho, he was surprised to find me smiling, smiling, because everything was backed up, yes, without him having to do it, everything was automatically backed up, where, to a server outside our office, so even if he had come in, saying I burned the hard disk, we would have been covered, so how do we do it, or to be precise, how can you do it.

Well we as a company can spend resources and time to do it, and also offer this as a full featured solution to our customers to be able to do Disaster Management, but for you at home, I have a few tricks up the sleeve, that will let you do this online, without ever having to really do anything, it’s all automatic, and all for free, don’t believe me, read on.

Though if you use online office editors, such as Google Docs or Zoho, Edit Grid or one of these, your documents would be stored online, but at times you have some documents, etc that you have downloaded, and or given by a friend, that you want backed up, a very innovative jugaad, as you may call it, from my younger brother to my mother was, why don’t you email everything to yourself, but then, hey it’s all step by step, dependent manually on you, so how do we do it automatically.

So how do we do it, head on to www.mozy.com and sign up for their free plan. They have a free plan, that let’s you use 2GB of space on their servers for free. In case you need more space, you will need to depend on a paid plan. Once you have signed up, visit the email account that you used to sign up and confirm the account by clicking on the link in the email.

Once the confirmation is done, we are just steps away from ensuring that your important files are backed up. Download the Mozy client from their website, once you have the client downloaded, it will take you approximately about 3 minutes to have it setup. Then it will come up to a page to ask you to select files and folders you want to backup, select these (this is a lengthy process for it to search for files, so be paitient and let it complete it’s job)

I know most of you will just straight forward jump on to selecting everything, but remember backing up your MP3 collection may seem important, choose properly on what means a lot to you, for example, your files that you keep on your desktop, your address book, the backup of your phone data in case you have it on your PC, the documents folder.

Once the selection is made, the PC will start backing up files to Mozy’s web server, and will give you a pop up window that shows you the backup process. Now let’s setup the options so that you can have the backup done automatically. Go to the application and it’s preferences and make sure the following are setup

Goto Scheduling, and Schedule the time your Backup should be done, you need to make sure your PC is on at the time this is scheduled, I personally select a time of 11 AM daily, Also on the automatic backups, I have selected 30% in the option 1 (wait until the compute r is less than this % busy), 10 in the second option (wait until user is away from the compute for atleast these many minutes), and 24 (hours between backups)

I have also changed the option, to alert me after 2 days in case the backup has not happened. In the bandwidth let this option be, as it is set to 1 mbps, and probably the home plan you have is only 256k or 512 k, that’s it, you are all set.

Now in case you were to delete files of your computer or loose your computer, all you need to do is, goto www.mozy.com and select restore files, and it will give you 3 options, 1. To download the files using a Mozy client, 2, a web download, i.e like you download files from websites, and third to ship you a DVD (most expensive).

I personally feel Mozy is a great free service, though on the paid front, I would not really be able to comment, as I have not used it, but there are a number of other services, and a few others are coming up, so look out, and keep your data secure.