Rekindling my like for Mozy
The first time I tried Mozy for online storage and backup, it was in beta and it felt like it. I ran into some troubled backups, a few crashes… nothing terrible, but with lots of options available in this space, it didn’t take much for me to look for another solution.
What’s happened since? EMC acquired Mozy; that gives instant credibility to this online storage service, something Omnidrive users would probably love to have right now. Second, Mozy has updated its software for Mac, and it’s now more user-friendly than before, more invisible than before, and more easily configurable than before. Setup of the Mac software reminds me of .Mac: you can choose specific category types to backup (your Address Book, iCal, Documents Folder, etc.) and Mozy takes care of the rest; or you can specifically choose the files you want to back up.
I’m a backup freak. I use .Mac and Amazon’s S3 service for my documents, as well as calendar, address book and keychain backups. (At home, I regularly backup my entire hard drive to an outboard unit, and I use Leopard’s Time Machine.) Mozy’s free account gives me 2 GB, which is more than enough for docs and those other critical files.
But I have a large music library, currently about 60 GB, and it’s preserved on one outboard hard drive (plus Time Machine) at home, which isn’t exactly what I’d call a foolproof plan. I’ve hesitated to add an offsite backup of the contents, simply because there’s so much music and even with the reasonably fast upload speeds I have at home, it will take a very long time to transport all that stuff to the servers. But now may be the time to bite the bullet.
Amazon S3 offers competitive storage and transfer rates and you pay only for what you use (I pay less than 30 cents a month for about 2 GB of space currently), and Mozy offers unlimited storage for $4.95 a month, with discounts if you buy one or two years at a time. “Buying” around 70 GB of space from Mozy is cheaper than procuring it from S3 – you can do the math to figure out the point where Mozy gets the cost advantage. And while catastrophic things can happen to big companies, too, somehow the EMC name makes me more comfortable entrusting it with such a huge chunk of my life.
I’ll wait, though. A few weeks of using the new Mozy backup will give me a better handle on how it’s working; then I’ll decide where in the cloud I’ll store that giant mass of digital bits I own.
Listening to this week’s MacBreak Weekly, I’m reminded of an excellent at-home option: Drobo, the little black box that intelligently backs up your content and mirrors it across multiple drives. Backups at home should never be the single element of your backup strategy, but it’s not a bad idea to keep at least one copy of your stuff close by.
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I use Carbonite for the backup of my music and media — Unlimited realtime backups. Unfortunately, it’s Windows only right now. I’ve found .Mac to be a huge disappointment for my backups because it is sort of on the expensive side and the Address Book backup doesn’t back up the notes part of an address (where I have a habit of keeping lots of info). I did like that .Mac made it easy for the transfer of my bookmarks and widgets to my new mac, and website publishing for photo sharing is easy.
.Mac: are you referring to the “Sync” part of the service? That does leave out fields, for no good reason. However, I might be wrong but I think the “Backup” part of .Mac takes the entire Address Book file. As for expensive, yes absolutely, and Apple’s move last year to increase storage space did little to make it competitive.
I heard many positive things about Carbonite
You are correct. I was referring to the “Sync” function. I have used
the “backup” part of .Mac, and I think you are right that it backs up
the entire address file/archive. Backup fails often though, for some
reason. I’ve only been able to get a complete backup to .Mac once.
I’d suspect that your music library is a fairly static data set (i.e., you’re not remixing those existing tracks, are you?) to which you are periodically adding: why not just use DVD? The initial backup would be tedious, but incrementals thereafter would be relatively simple, straightforward, and cheap.
my principle concern is offsite backup, since I have multiple hard drives at home with backups. I could burn DVD’s and take them to work or to a friend’s place, and that can be a great solution, but for myself, I don’t want to create more physical media. Backing up to the cloud means a similarly tedious initial backup, but also just incremental backups afterward.
Thanks for commenting!
I discovered a Memopal (http://www.memopal.com) “cutting edge solution for online
backup”
They merged online backup, online storage and file sharing services into one product.
If you try this service you will notice that (contrary to most competitors):
- You can access your files in (true) real time with a web browser
- They really offer 250 GB (some competitors offer a fake unlimited web
space, they say “fair use”)
- You can share a file or many files with the 1-click-share functionality
- Some of your files will be uploaded very very fast (turboupload)
- The service and website are in 10 different languages
I’ve also found two useful guide to online backup on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_backup