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.
