Mozy Eases Recovery from a Burglary

"When I first heard about Mozy, it was a real lightbulb moment--why keep backing things up to an external hard drive that I have to worry about becoming lost, stolen, or destroyed somehow? Cloud backup became an obvious choice."

While vacationing in Australia, Katherine Coombs received the chilling news that her London home had been burglarized. Her family had only recently moved, making much of her family's electronics easy to identify and carry off. Coombs' computer had been unpacked, and it too was taken.

Times like these are trying on any family, but there was one consolation for Coombs—she quickly realized that her computer data was safe, thanks to Mozy. "I logged in from Australia, saw that everything was backed up, and knew I wouldn't have to worry about restoring my data when I got back to England," she says. "It was a sleep-easy moment."

Within a week of returning home and replacing her computer with a new model, Coombs had fully re-populated her data from Mozy's secure cloud storage. The experience highlighted the value of secure, reliable backup—catastrophic data loss is such a high-impact event that dependable, reliable, and easily accessible recovery is a necessity.

Coombs has been a senior IT executive for years, so she knows what to look for in backup solutions. In years past she had relied on external hard drives, but the shortcomings became clear when she considered the advantages of cloud backup. "When I first heard about Mozy, it was a real lightbulb moment—why keep backing things up to an external hard drive that I have to worry about becoming lost, stolen, or destroyed somehow?" she says. "Cloud backup became an obvious choice."

Although the data recovery from the theft was Coombs' most dramatic use of the Mozy service, she also uses it on a regular basis as a remote file store -- a direction in which Mozy's product is moving anyway. Instead of carrying additional portable drives, she simply logs in to her Mozy account and selectively downloads key files when she needs them while away from her main computer. "Other people use Dropbox or carry around more drives, but I don't want my data in more places than I need," she says. "Mozy keeps my data backed up, I keep it synchronized, and that's it for me."