It's 9 am, do you know where your data is?

Let's face it. As reliable as computers have become, they can still let us down from time to time. A few accidental key strokes, a virus caught, or a hard drive failure can leave your computer with no brains, or if you are fortunate, only a few files may be missing or damaged. Murphy's law tells us this will happen at the worst possible moment and perhaps with the most important files damaged.

Recently, large hard drives have become very reasonably priced. This offers a possible solution for backing up your most important files on your computer,  but how often should you back up that large drive? Experience shows that most people will not back it up at all. In fact, many computer users do not back up their files at all and this is really gambling.

With the almost universal usage of high-speed, broadband Internet services, we have been provided with a good solution to this problem -- remote backup services. Your data is saved to a remote computer where it is protected from all possible problems that happen on your personal computer.

One very good remote backup solution is provided by a company called Mozy.

With Mozy, you download and install a simple client application, tell it what files you would like to backup and Mozy does the rest. Backups can be done daily or weekly and you can specify that the backup only takes place when the computer is not in use if you like. There is a Mozy client for Windows computers and for Macs also.

The good news is that Mozy has a free service. You can protect up to 2 GB of data for free! In addition, if you use the Mozy link above to access their site, you will get an additional quota of 250 MB and so will I.

In addition to the free service, there is a paid service which allows you to backup an unlimited amount of data for $4.95 a month. This would theoretically allow you to backup an entire computer, but practically, it would probably take too long to backup that much data and this is not recommended.

Another good feature of Mozy is the ability to backup more than one computer. This is available for the free service as well as the unlimited service, so if you are like me and have a laptop and a desktop computer, you can back them both up subject to the available quota from your account.