Optimize PC|Windows Computer Tips and Resources

Chances are, the files that you store on your computer are pretty important to you. Whether you have personal projects on your computer’s hard drive, important emails, videos and pictures of your family and friends, your taxes, or just a big list of your favorite recipes — you would probably hate to lose some of these things. However, we can’t really predict when a hard drive might fail, or when a virus or bug will take possession of our PCs, along with all of our prized documents, so it’s important to have a backup of your work, just in case something bad happens. Because, inevitably, it is almost guaranteed to happen at least once in your lifetime. It happens to me at least once every couple of years.

This is where the Mozy Online Backup Service comes in. For home PC users who do not feel the need to backup all of their computer’s files, Mozy’s free service offers 2GB of secure storage without any cost, whatsoever. 2GB is quite a bit of space — you can store a few hundred thousand text, Word, or .pdf files or a few thousand medium-resolution image files.

I personally use Mozy, and I subscribe to their unlimited backup offer for my home computer, and that’s less than $5 per month. The Unlimited Home version and their free online backup offer are the same, just one offers less space, and the other costs $4.95 per month.

I looked at a ton of different remote backup options, and I spent hours weighing out different services that offered free storage, and those that offered free trials of their online backup tools. In the end, I chose Mozy — in fact, I didn’t even really use their free service before I upgraded to their unlimited Home version. Overall, their reviews are great, they offer secure online backups, Mozy will backup your computer’s files throughout the day automatically, and restoring backed-up files is very simple and straightforward.

I have a few GB of family photos on my home PC, though, and I wasn’t comfortable with the other remote backup option that I was using, so I opted to spend the $5 per month to have a secure online backup of all of my computer’s data, not just a portion of the files that I deemed to be most valuable.

For me, Mozy is the best online backup service that I found. And, I really did look. If you want to give their online storage service a spin, you can register for a free, 2GB starter account. However, if you have a lot of files on your PC, Mozy’s unlimited backup package is the best in the business, in my opinion anyway.