2GB of Free Online Backup? Yes!

You're probably getting tired of me harping on you about doing your backups. But I honestly don't blame you for not wanting to do them. You don't want to tie up your machine for hours. You don't want to buy an external hard drive. You don't understand how to burn DVDs properly. I get it, really I do.

But after you read this post you're going to have no excuse. None. If you have Windows XP and a broadband connection to the net, you can start backing up your files online without even the slightest of headaches. If you're backing up 2GB or less, it's free (making this the only free online backup I'm aware of).

Mozy is a new service (currently in beta) that lets you do your backups via the Internet. Yes, many services like this already exist, but they're expensive: Old-guard company Xdrive costs $10 a month for 5GB of space. Mozy gives you 2GB of space for free, 5GB for $1.95 a month, and 30GB for $4.95 a month. That blows Xdrive out of the water completely.

To get started with Mozy, you register and download a small application that stays running on your PC. The Mozy app scans your computer for files you might want to back up, and you can tweak the types you want. (I'm backing up word processing documents but not music, for example.) If you need more control over files and folders, you can drill deeper into advanced options to select backups on a file-by-file basis. Your data is encrypted on Mozy's site.

Power users will absolutely love Mozy: You can schedule backups to run constantly, to run only during off hours, to back up open files, and even to throttle bandwidth if the app is running during peak usage times. And yet none of this is complex. Even a novice user should have no trouble setting up Mozy to run only at night.

The software's in beta and so it's still not quite finished. I'd love to see a way to pause a backup in progress, for starters. My biggest complaint, though, has nothing to do with the Mozy software but rather the Mozy website: There's no way to change the email address your account is registered under! (Mozy President Josh Coates wrote to show me that you can change your email address; click "Edit Profile" and look for the [change this] tag next to your email address. Thanks, Josh!)

But hey, I'm not complaining. 2GB of free backups, awesome software, and peace of mind? Sign me up, and you should too. Feel free to use the referral code 84LUVN during registration if you decide to give it a spin yourself.