While I find personal finance and investing fascinating, my true passion is technology. Therefore, I thought I would share a piece of software that recently rescued me from losing six years of financial data I had stored in Quicken.

It’s called Mozy, and it’s a small download you install on your PC (or Mac) that backs-up your computer automatically by uploading your important data to a remote server.

For a lot of people, the idea of saving their essential data on some remote computer owned by another company takes some getting used to, which is understandable. However, all of the data has high strength encryption, and the company itself has an array of backups of, well, your backups. You also gain the advantage of a remote server, which is that backups you might store locally on an external hard drive or DVD could be affected by fire or theft, while this cannot.

Best of all, it’s free, very simple to use, and requires little attention once you have set it up. For me, it backs up any new or modified files every night while I’m eating dinner. The backup process usually only takes a few minutes since it only backs up data that I have modified. The initial backup can take quite awhile depending on your connection speed and the amount of data you are backing up, but that’s only a one time deal.

Mozy’s configuration makes it easy to back up common files like your documents and spreadsheets. It even has a category for financial documents, so all I did was click a checkbox and I automatically had backups of all of my Quicken files. This was especially useful last week when I reformatted my hard drive and forgot to copy my old archived Quicken files I had hidden in a directory deep in my system. In literally two minutes I was able to restore that file thanks to Mozy.

So even if you already have a backup plan in place, I highly suggest checking out Mozy as a “fire and forget” backup system. Again, it’s free and gives you 2gb of space – plenty for all of your documents, and even some room for email and pictures as well.