Tip of the Iceberg

Category utilities
I've long been a fan of Data Deposit Box; at $2 per GB per month, it's been a cheap way of ensuring that I can get back my most crucial files should some catastrophy manage to simultaneously wipe out both my laptop and my NAS. This would still get expensive were I to back up my entire iTunes library (though evidently not nearly as expensive as it would be to back up Greyhawk's), so I've only been backing up the data that I consider to be truly irreplaceable. However, I recently discovered a service that removes that limitation: Mozy.

A subsidiary of EMC, Mozy gives you the first 2 GB free, or unlimited storage for the ridiculous price of $4.95 per month (per computer). In a few ways, it's very similar to Data Deposit Box: you install a small utility, define what you want backed up, and it runs in the background, sending your files to some server. But there are a host of features that make it (in my opinion) far superior despite also being cheaper:

• Prior to uploading, it encrypts every file. I'm not a cryptography buff, so I'm not sure how secure their approach truly makes your data, but their description looks impressive.
• By default (with an option in the preferences to disable this), the Windows version automatically adds a section to My Computer, allowing you to browse the folder structure just like any other drive, see what date(s) each file was backed up, and easily restore a specific version.
• The selection filters are extremely easy to use. In addition to my iTunes library (and various other categories of data), I have a "backup set" that selects any file in my Notes data folder (and all subfolders) with an extension of nsf, ntf, or id... so I'm not backing up crap like the modems files, just the stuff I really need (with the possible exception of standard IBM templates I can easily get back because I've never modified them).
• It's definitely an incremental backup... in the history, it shows the "patch size" that was sent to the server, so I can tell that the files I've modified since they were originally backed up are not resent in their entirety, just what is deemed to have changed. Time will tell how accurate this is, but so far it seems pretty solid.
• My favorite is one I haven't used yet and probably, hopefully, never will: in addition to restoring individual files/folders directly from the local operating system, on their website you can log in to your account and create a restoral request, selecting whatever data you want to retrieve. In addition to an option to just download the restoral data...... for a nominal fee they will FedEx you however many DVDs it takes to store the entirety of the requested data. So if a single event killed my laptop, my NAS, and my server, they'd send me 9 DVDs containing my entire MP3 collection, and the most recent backup of my blog, my personal email account, all my code, and my cert.id. My insomnia just got a tiny bit better.

There's only one feature that Data Deposit Box has that I miss: it backs up monitored files as soon as they're changed, whereas Mozy does a periodic backup (with an option to manually run at any time), so I could potentially lose a whole day's work if a database got deleted and I had to restore from the previous evening's copy. On the other hand, all the databases I develop for work are replicated to Lotus 911's servers periodically throughout the day, so it would only be personal stuff that I'd be relying on Mozy to store for me, so losing a few hours' changes in those databases wouldn't be as impactive. Besides, with Data Deposit Box, you have to tell it how many copies of each file to maintain to keep your total storage (and monthly bill) at a reasonable level... with Mozy, it keeps every verson, so I don't want it saving another version every time I hit Ctrl+S after adding five more lines of LotusScript. Heck, that's what DesignCatalog is for.