Excellent online backup service - Mozy

So a little over a month ago, I was freaking out. My wife and I had decided to end the madness of having data strewn across three laptop computers (two of them old and obsolete), a desktop computer (rather old and obsolete), an external hard drive, and numerous CDs. I undertook the laborious task of consolidating all of our personal data into one place. The most tedious - but in many ways, also the most rewarding - of these tasks was organizing and deduping thousands of digital photos we had. Some dated as far back as 1998.

Of course, no sooner did I have this done than I began having visions at all times of the day and night of my hard drive crashing and losing years upon years of precious digital memories. While I felt somewhat safe mirroring the external USB drive to the laptop and backing up once a month, we wanted to keep the external drive in a locked safe under the bed. I knew that backups would only happen once a twice a year with the hassle of pulling it out, setting it up, and running the backups - and I couldn't let that happen.

So what else could I do? I could join Smugmug or use Picasaweb and back up all of my digital photos there. In fact, I do use Picasaweb - but it's more for public photo sharing of compressed images (1600x1280) and easy access from any PC or device. Also, online photo sharing services are not complete backup solutions. Even though I'm primarily a Google Docs & Spreadsheets guy for almost all of my personal files now, there's a fairly significant archive of personal data and MP3 files that I want backed up.

That's where Mozy came in. I've had an excellent experience with this incremental, continuous online backup service. The initial backup requires patience - it can take a week or more, depending upon the data - but after that, it's more or less invisible and requires absolutely zero thought and effort on my part. And it only costs $5 a month for unlimited storage space.

Take away my backup worries for $5 a month? Well worth it.

I also tested Carbonite, which also had great ease of use and setup. But Carbonite couldn't handle backups from external USB drives - so Mozy got my business.

Customer service has been outstanding. Mozy had a short period of irregular access in terms of backup, and to make amends, the founder sent an email to every customer apologizing, stating what had been done to rectify the situation, and offering customers a choice of what level of remuneration they felt was fair for their level of incovenience - 1 month free, 2 months free, 3 months free, or no worries - no free service required.

It was an incredibly standup thing to do. It's incredibly rare for a company to allow customers to pick what kind of compensation they think is fair for outages or interrupts. I felt incredibly valued as a customer and my respect for Mozy and its leadership grew tremendously.

I haven't seen a glitch since then, and can count myself as a very satisfied customer.