Hi All,
A few people have posted about backups recently, thought I would
share my experience with an online backup service called Mozy. This
online service gives me incremental backups offsite (free up to 2Gb,
$5 US/mth for unlimited). I have been doing backups (using .Mac
Backup for incrementals) to an external lacie drive, but find it very
hard to arrange offsite backups - even though I have two drives, in
practice it is impossible to have an up to date offsite backup.
Here is how Mozy works:
- signup at mozy.com (Mac version is in beta)
- select the file groups or directories from your Mac you want to backup
- first backup takes a while (e.g. a day or two, depending on size)
- subsequent incremental backups (just changes) work in background -
don't even notice it.
The Mac version is in beta, but has worked well for me. My initial
upload was just under 1Gb. I have an iiNet ADSL2+ connection, which
has a 1mb/sec upload. The initial backup was kicked off in the
morning, and finished that night. It sends groups of files, and is
pretty resilient to drop outs etc. The history shows it does pick
up changed files and send them off in the background. You really
don't notice it at all.
Backups are encrypted.
I tried the restoration process, and it works. You select the files
to restore, and you receive an email with a link to a .dmg file to
download. Pretty easy, and practical.
I arranged my files so that I could easily select the directories I
wanted backed up - I don't send music/photos etc to this service.
Although with the $5/mth unlimited service, I may do that one day.
When I first signed up for the beta, the download link for the
Mac .dmg was missing. Their tech support took a day to get back, and
they didn't believe the link was missing. When they did actually
check, they fixed it quickly. Based on this experience I think their
support service may be slowish in general, perhaps they respond
faster if you are a paying customer and not using the freebie.
Overall, if you want offsite, incremental backups, this is a good
service.
Glenn.
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