When I posted about Simplify Media, the free service for sharing iTunes libraries online with friends, it seemed to be a big hit. I actually used the service for a while before I even thought to blog about it. It made me think, “What other free services do I use and take for granted that others should know about?” Today I read a post on Chris’ blog that triggered another one for you guys.

Ever since I got my beloved MacBook Pro I’ve been using Mozy to safely backup all my data online. The client sits in my taskbar and automatically backs up all my data online. A free account gives me 2GB of storage space, which is plenty since I don’t bother to backup my iTunes library, pictures or videos (I still have all the music CDs, the pictures are also stored on my desktop at home and videos I manually dump on our church’s backup server). There are three things I love about Mozy:

1. It doesn’t bug me. I seriously forgot it was there until I read Chris’ blog. It just works on its own.
2. It’s easy to set up and use. I just choose what I want it to backup (like iCal, Mail, system preferences, documents, even specific file types or folders) and click OK.
3. It uses almost no system resources. It has never affected CPU usage or memory, the exact opposite from other backup solutions I’ve tried.

Backups are something you don’t usually think of until it’s too late, which is why I love Mozy. I thought of it once long enough to setup Mozy and haven’t thought of it since then. I just love the security of knowing every time I check on it I see something like, “Last backup: 1 hour ago.”

Admittedly, I’ve only used the Mac beta version, so I can’t speak for the Windows version, but if the Mac beta works this well, I can only assume that the Windows version, which is not in beta, works just as well. The biggest downside to the Windows version is, well, that it’s running on Windoze. ;)

Check out Mozy.

[tags]Mozy[/tags]

Posted on August 6, 2007