You’ve heard the warnings: It’s not if you’ll lose vital data through some hard drive catastrophe but when. So backing up files is critical. As passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 have discovered, you may want to consider a backup service in the “cloud.”
Few people suffer data loss in quite as harrowing a fashion as Bill Wiley. He was a second row passenger on the plane that was famously forced to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River. The passengers all survived the crash, of course. But Wiley still hasn’t recovered the two computers he had on board, containing about 250 gigabytes of data from his employer Computer Associates.
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.”
Mozy says it stores more than 10 petabytes of data (roughly 500 trillion pages of text). The company charges home users $4.95 a month for backup. Businesses pay $3.95 per month for each license, plus 50 cents per GB. You can restore data for free over the Web but must pay a fee for a DVD.
My own experience is nowhere near as dramatic. But I too recently lost crucial files on my home computer that I was able to restore with an online subscription to Carbonite. Consumers pay $55 a year for this life preserver.
Wiley has since signed with Mozy. (Full disclosure: USA TODAY got in touch with the two passengers after being contacted by Mozy. Though neither works with the company, Mozy gave Wiley a comp subscription, and waived the fee for Jorgensen’s DVDs.) The episode, he says, left him with a new meaning for the term crash.
By Edward Baig, USA Today
