Wild.er

On October 1st a building a few blocks from mine had an electrical problem that caused a fire that destroyed the entire building (read the Post’s story about it here). Adam and I were talking about the fire that Monday night at tennis and thinking about complete destruction of one’s personal belongings seems to make photographers say that we’d grab our negatives and hard drives and run out of the blazing building. Forget clothes and furniture and our important files. It’s all about the photography, even the old crap stuff from early on.

The safer way to keep digital photographs around through fires, lightning strikes, hard drive failures or spilled drinks on the laptop is to backup the irreplaceable files off site.  The idea makes perfect senese but I never seriously looked into doing it myself until that fire in the neighborhood.

I researched companies that provide online backup services and I am using one now called Mozy. I like it because they have a free 2 GB version that you can use with no strings attached.  All you do is tell the software which folders or files need to be backed up and then when the computer is not being used it connects to Mozy’s servers and securely saves everything.  If you add items to the folder then the new items get backed up in the subsequent backups.  If you have more than 2 GB of critical files, photos or emails you can pay a reasonable $4.95/month for unlimited storage. That is some peace of mind! If you want to sign up for Mozy then do it here and we both get another 256 MB of free storage space.

What are you doing to backup your files? Are you prepared if your hard drive doesn’t spin when you wake up in the morning? Leave your thoughts & happy/horror stories in the comments.

[Mozy via Lifehacker]