Offsite Backup Solutions

The challenge of removable media: You need an offsite copy of the most up to date backup data in order to have a sound backup strategy. To make removable media a truly effective solution, a key employee or offsite storage company must take a copy of the previous night's media offsite on a daily basis. To make matters more challenging, the "key" employee must have a co-worker who acts as a "second" and takes the media home  in the event the first employee is sick or on holidays.

With respect to offsite storage companies, they can be quite expensive ($500 to $600 per month) to have tapes picked up on a daily basis.

The solution: Last year, I discovered a great company that offers an affordable, effective remote backup solution. They are Mozy Backup Systems, also known as Berkeley Data Systems.

The technology: All data is encrypted and backed up over an Internet connection on a nightly basis. What is truly amazing about this technology is that only the small portion of any changed file is backed up. So if you have a 2 Gigabyte Outlook data file, or even a 16 Gigabyte Microsoft Exchange database on your server, only the small portion of the file that has changed is backed up keeping the backup time window as short as possible.

Security: One of the concerns clients typically have with remote backup solutions the question of security. Both the Internet connection and the data that travels over it is encrypted. Data is encrypted either by using either Mozy's encryption key or one that you create yourself.

Who is Mozy?: Two of Mozy/Berkeley data systems' many high profile clients are:

• Stanford Law School
• Every division of GE (General Electric)

(these are only two of many Enterprise size clients that are willing to publicize that they back up their data with Mozy)

Versions:

Mozy home free version: 2 GB of FREE data storage for up to two PC's (2GB is the total limit for data from both PC's), no monthly or yearly costs, runs on Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, Windows Vista.

Mozy home unlimited version: Unlimited data storage for $4.95 per month per PC. Great for backing up all your email, documents, photos and music. Runs on Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, Windows Vista. You can't mix and match the free and paid versions.

Mozy Pro: Primarily for business, $3.95 per license (one license per server or workstation) and $0.50 per Gigabyte of data. Contact Katz Networks for more information on purchasing and implementation.