29 Oct 2008

By PETER WAYNER, New York Times

Last update: October 28, 2008 - 4:25 PM

Now cost-effective and readily available, online backup options begin to make sense

“My wife’s computer crashed first,” Francis Wade lamented. His followed a few weeks later, as if part of some malicious digital conspiracy.

“God knows what happened to it. Windows started to misbehave. I couldn’t get into anything. It got progressively slower and slower,” Wade said.

It was too slow to even make a backup.

Fortunately, everything worked out as well as it could for the couple after Wade, a business consultant, reinstalled a clean version of Windows and restored his and his wife’s personal files with Mozy, an online backup service that maintains a copy of all of the files in a distant electronic bunker.

Online backup services are proliferating as users are discovering that it can cost less than a fancy cup of coffee to …

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