Scott Hanselman wrote today about family backup plans and alerted me to MozBackup. MozBackup can backup all of your crucial Firefox and Thunderbird files to a single, consolidated PCV file, saving you the hassle of figuring out where all the crucial files live on your hard disk.

You still have to back that PCV file up to a CD or an external drive, but now you have one file to back up instead of several dozen, scattered across several different, deeply hidden directory trees with non-obvious names.

Speaking of backup plans, I need a better one for myself. I regularly do a manual backup of my crucial data to a rotating set of thumbdrives and move them by hand between my different computers. I'm not doing a good job of backing up my photos, only sporadically backing them up by hand to external USB drives.

I really need:

• a centralized server at home, so that all the other computers can do a network backup to it;

• automated backup on a regular basis;

• to take some of those backups offline — or better still, offsite;

• a private Subversion server on the Internet, so I can keep most of my crucial files under version control, obviating the need to move them by hand from computer to computer.