Whether it is a hard drive failing, a fire, or even the dramatic case of Bill Wiley who is still yet to recover his two laptops from the Airways Flight 1549 crash into the Hudson River.
Wiley had been good about backing up files on the two computers by sharing the contents of one hard drive with the other. He also kept data on thumb drives. And he rarely traveled with both machines, but had to in this case because of an assignment. “I had no idea how screwed I was about to be,” he recalls.
Fellow passenger Paul Jorgensen was more fortunate, at least when it came to his computer. The night before the flight, Jorgensen backed up “a ton of data” on his IBM ThinkPad via a business account his employer had with the Mozy online backup service. Jorgensen works for Epocrates, a producer of medical software.
“Pretty quickly after I realized I was 100% safe [on the ferry] I realized I was going to be in pretty deep trouble without that laptop,” says Jorgensen, who had been seated in the first row of the plane. “My life is in that laptop.”
Within a day, Mozy sent him 6 DVDs with recovered data. “The accident was on a Thursday. By Monday I was completely back up and running.”
I have personally used Mozy on a Mac Mini at home to back up data for a couple of years now and have no complaints.
