Not too long ago, almost all of my high tech clients would build a server room with raised flooring, Liebert (another client) 24 hour air conditioning, and UPS systems the size of a Hummer.  More often that not, those build outs now look as dated as a wood-paneled earth-toned space with 8' ceilings.  Computing is getting faster, cooler, and frequently more remote.  And the absolute best remote data storage service that I've seen is a simple service called...Mozy.

It has saved my neck twice in the three short months that I've been using it personally.  Mozy comes in several flavors.  Their first offer is 2GB of free personal storage.  That's right, free.  No strings attached.  2GB is enough to back up all of your important stuff except for the several thousand photos of your kids and your extensive music collection.  For those things, you'll want to pay $4.95/month for unlimited personal backup.  

For your business, you'll want MozyPro, which will automatically back up your company servers.  It's priced at just $4/server and $.50/GB per month.  At those prices, it makes no sense to house that redundancy and maintain the requisite technology in your office.

I first tried Mozy on my home PC.  One night, after spending about 3 hours on a financial analysis spreadsheet, I saved it and went to bed.  A day or so later, I went to open the file and it was gone - vanished!  Was I so tired I deleted it?  My kids perhaps?  To this day I don't know, and it doesn't matter.  Because when I went to Mozy, there it was, waiting for me.  About a month later, I turned on the machine (a six month old Dell) and was greeted by the infamous "blue screen of death".  After a call to Bangalore, the Dell tech informed me that my only choice was a complete reinstall of my operating system and deletion of all of my data.  Fortunately, Mozy had done a full backup of all of my files the day before, and within a couple of hours I had every single one resored onto my clean machine.

Mozy backs up data better and cheaper than we can do it ourselves.  Your IT department may not want to hear that, although it is true.  You don't need the tape or disk back up systems any more than you need the 3 1/4" floppy disks.  Get rid of them,  get Mozy, and as they say in Jersey, "F'getaboutit". Do yourself a favor and, right now, at least get the free version for your personal PC. Less is more.