Doing the Mozy - Online Backup That Is
I am one of those procrastinating people like most. Because of that I have lacked a backup of my important files. The most important thing on my computer are actually all the photos of the my kids. Since we hardly ever print the photos out if my hard drive got hosed we would loose a ton of memories.
I had looked at online backups several months ago and had decided that I was going to use Carbonite since I had read so many good reviews of them. I even told a coworker about Carbonite and he said he was going to use it also - neither of us did.
Recently I installed Vista and was extremely disappoint so I wanted to try the whole OSx86 thing to get Mac OS X running on my Dell. Because the install deals with messing around with partitions (when dual booting) I did not want to take the chance with all of our pictures. Therefore I restricted myself to having a complete backup somewhere in case things went bad.
The first thing I did was check out what people were saying about Carbonite (blog search rocks!). Some people were not-so-happy with them and had mentions Mozy. Another quick search of Mozy found that people were generally happy with their service.
A visit to their site revealed that the had 2GB free so you could try them out. I also noticed that they were going to have Mac support soon also which was even better. In their comparison chart that pitted them against Carbonite and several other services Mozy seemed to have everything I needed.
I signed up for the free account.
After a day and a half I backed up 1.5GB of my data and decided I liked the service and upgraded to the unlimited paid service which is a whopping $4.95/month. You can’t beat that especially for unlimited space. It took me about a week to backup 11.5GB of data on my machine. I only did backups during the day because I cannot sleep with my computer on at night - it is just too noisy.
The only issue that I had during the whole experience was that one day when I tried to start the backup it gave me this cryptic error message. I went to the site and did not find any info helpful info concerning the error message. I sent a email to support and while waiting for a reply noticed that they had a newer version of their software available. I installed it and the issue went away.
I got a reply shortly after and they informed me that there was a check box where you could update you software automatically - wish that was on by default. While I had their attention I pinged them about Mac support and they sent me a link to their beta mac software. I installed it this morning and backed up a section of my MacBook.
I now have 3 different computers backup up with about 15GB of data on Mozy. The coolest thing is that if I am at work and there is something that I needed from my home computer I can get a copy via their web interface.
If you are looking for a backup solution I would highly recommend Mozy. The initial backup can take some time but that is the case with any backup. But after that it is complete un-intrusive. You can manage multiple computers under the same account and get backups either online or delivered to you via Fed Ex (you have to pay extra for that).
As easy as Mozy is their is no reason to put you backups of any longer.