Inevitably, hard drives fail. It’s a part of life in the electronic age. Unfortunately, it always seems to happen when you are a) in a crisis or business emergency and b) when the backups you thought you had, you don’t have. I’ve been there – the hard drive starts making a clicking sound or (worse) [...]

We’ve used online backup services for years, including Mozy, Backblaze, Carbonite, and Connected. Over those years, the evolution of the services has been slow and the features have not expanded greatly. With Mozy 2.0, EMC promises a much improved user experience. The biggest change to the software is a new feature called 2xProtect – a [...]

Backup software has to meet a few basic standards to be considered good: it has to be easy to use, it has to be quick, and it has to be painless. Backing up your computer is not sexy. It’s not exciting. It doesn’t make you want to drop everything and jump right on that. It [...]

I’ve used a number of USB Flash drives over the years to carry data with me, transfer it between work and home, or store school papers to print at the lab. USB Flash drives are immensely useful – and with storage in the multiples of gigabytes now, can store more data than common hard drives [...]

Microsoft has improved the backup experience quite a bit in Windows 7. Backup and Restore, a much improved backup utility, is more than enough for most users to backup their PC to a local storage device. The improved backup software uses shadow copy features of Windows 7 to make iterative backups when necessary. This reduces [...]