My external drive is now full, and I can’t backup to it any longer. I’ve been thinking about my next step- I could get a new external drive, which are pretty cheap these days, but in the event of some calamity I’m sure it’d perish in the house with the rest of my stuff. Or I could go with an off-site backup service, like Mozy. There are pros and cons to each option, but I think I’m leaning toward Mozy.
Has anyone used it? Have any good or bad experiences? Any recommendations? Thanks, y’all.
Just so we’re clear on how Mozy works. It backs up whatever you tell it to on your system’s hard drives, and will keep it in sync. If you delete it from your computer, it will delete it from Mozy (after like 30 days). Mozy is for making sure you don’t lose valuable files. It’s not about permanent storage of files offsite.
That being said, it works great for me. I’m backing up about 200GB right now, and the initial backup took about 3 weeks. You can control when it backs up, and how much of your bandwidth it uses. I’ve set certain directories to back up, and it pretty much runs in the background all by itself now. I haven’t actually had to restore anything yet, but I would assume that works just fine.
It depends on how much data you’ve got and the type of data. How big is your current full drive? Is your backed up data fairly static (such as your music and photo collection), or dynamic (such as manuscripts for your novel or accounting data for your business)? External drives would be better for static data and Mozy for dynamic data in my opinion. Here’s one backup strategy I’ve seen used for static data:
kferr- your strategy works well in theory but poorly (for me) in practice. I add to my static data (music and photos) on probably a weekly basis, and there’s no way I could keep up the backup/swap/move offsite strategy for more than a couple months. I’m looking for something fairly automated. I agree that what you suggest is probably the best way to handle it, but there’s no way it would work for me.
I have a 120GB hard drive on my MacBook, but typically only back up my Home folder- which includes Documents, Pictures, Music, and some other folders. If my hard drive crashes (which happened a couple years ago, prompting me to get more diligent with my backups), I assume I’d get a new drive and immediately restore the lost files from Mozy, or whatever online resource I was using.
Yeah if a hard drive croaks, you have 30 days to restore the files from Mozy before they delete it. If your whole computer dies, you just sign on to Mozy from another computer and restore, same 30 day time limit.
I use it for backing up about three gigabytes of my most critical files and am satisfied with it. Note that you can back up two gigabytes or less for free.
This past Xmas, my Passport saved my rear. I can’t say which is better, or which is best for you, but if you don’t have some sort of full-drive off-line data back up system in place that you update regularly, you’ll be so very sorry.
Please prove me wrong. I So want to be wrong here. I never want to ever hear “I lost every email from the past 3 jobs, all my word docs dating back to college papers, every spreadsheet program I ever had, every picture of my kids before last year, and every MP3 I ever owned.”