Backup Your Home Computer. Please.

Goodness, where's my soap box. Even some of my tech savvy friends are leaving their home computers without backup. Then they have a computer or disk crash (or they lose their laptop), and their files are gone. Boom.

Is that you? Stop it! Right now!

As we put more and more of our "important papers" (financial papers, precious photos, personal phone books, e-mail, $10,000 worth of downloaded music, etc) onto our computers and nowhere else, leaving that at the mercy of a disk crash doesn't make any sense. I have a feeling my friends simply underestimate the frequency of hard disk failure, and the amount of insane trouble it causes when it happens.

The number of choices, though, actually discourages them from actually doing anything (the classic "too many brands of toothpaste" problem). So I thought I'd just cut through the clutter.

If you're on a PC, use Carbonite. You pay $49.95/year for unlimited storage.
If you're on a PC or Mac, use MozyHome. You pay $4.95/month for unlimited storage (discounts if you pay for one or two years in advance).

Both solutions are "set it and forget it". You download some software, it monitors your computer, backs up what has changed, gets out of the way when you're actually using your machine, encrypts your files for safety. (Note: I have no relationship with any of these companies, I just think they provide a decent service at a decent price).

I like the idea of "unlimited storage", because the moment you have to pick and choose what you back up to fit inside a fixed allotment, it's too much work, and you won't do it. (That's also why "I'll just e-mail my important files to my G-Mail account" doesn't work as a backup strategy: too much work, you just won't do it). Companies like ibackup.com are charging $100/year for 5Gb (and I don't like their software). Consider them "old school".

About security: both Carbonite and MozyHome encrypt the backups on your local computer, so they are safe in transit. However, they hold copies of the decryption keys, so you have to trust them (and their procedures for keeping those keys safe). So if you are paranoid, this may not be for you. File Backup has fixed allocations of storage at a reasonable price ($80/year for 10Gb, $180/year for 50Gb), and they assert that only the user has the private key (they do not have it). Think of it like the safety deposit box where you have the only key. Of course, if you lose it or forget it, goodbye data.