Mosey taken to an art form!
Once you get into this digital photography thing and you start thinking about backups, you just can’t seem to have enough! I have redundant 500 GB drives for my images, but this does nothing for me if, say my house burned down, or someone stole my computer, or if the Mississippi River overflowed its banks and made it all the way to Charlotte, North Carolina, which would be quite a feat! Anyway, having an off-site backup is a good idea. There are a number of ways to do it.
- One could buy and extra drive and ship it to a friend, or perhaps store it at a relative’s house.
- You could rent a safe deposit box and store it there
- you could get one of the online services that store your data for about $100/GB
- Not do it and hope for the best!
So, searching for low cost alternatives, I found Mozy. Mozy is an unlimited backup service for $4.95/month. It works by installing a process on your computer that does, first, a full back up, over the Internet, of all of the files that you select. All files are encrypted and sent to Mozy. The process couldn’t be easier. Simply tell Mozy what you want to back up and turn it loose! You can even adjust how much network bandwidth it uses. You can move the slider so that you have a faster computer, or faster backups, or somewhere in the middle. When the backup is finished, it provides you with a history of how many files were backed up and how much time it took. It’s very simple!
My first backup, some 75 GB, started on 7/5/2007 and finished today! Yes, 6 full days! If that ain’t moseying, I don’t know what is! After your first full backup, all other backups are incremental based on when files have changed or been added since the last backup. I have a high speed DSL connection, rated at 8 Mb/sec. It’s pretty fast, but the Mozy backup service isn’t. If I have to restore, it would take a while. I would say that if you don’t have a T1, Cable Modem, or really High speed DSL, don’t even think about it. Dial-up is out of the question!
For those of you how aren’t familiar with southern vernaculars, to mosey means to go somewhere in no particular hurry! To stroll. To meander a bit! 
After completing my first full backup, Mozy immediately went into another backup. You see, while it was doing the full backup, I had added another 4 GB of files in that week. The next backup only took about 20 hours! So, it’s getting better!
Can I recommend Mozy? I don’t know. I’ve not had to do a restore, yet! If you don’t have a very high speed Internet connection AND you have a lot of files, AND you shoot RAW, I would probably say no. I’d say just get an extra book drive, copy it, rent a safe deposit box, or buy a fire proof safe, and update every once in a while, like monthly, perhaps. I’m thinking about buying a 160 GB drive ($99), making a copy, and heading for the off-site storage, but I’ll try Mozy for just a bit more … but I’d like to have a backup plan. See what I mean! It never ends!
Here are some comparisons of online backup services.
OK folks, time for me to mosey on up to Akron, OH for my aunt’s 80th birthday. I’ll be on the road all day. 
However, when I get there I’ll be staying at a hotel on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. Some of you older folks may remember when that river caught on fire! It’s a little bit cleaner now!
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7 Responses to “I know why they call it Mozy!”
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Sounds good I may give Mosey a try…I’ve got time
And don’t forget to give me a ring if you pass through Columbus!
5 Bucks per months sounds very reasonable. The most services that I know of charge a LOT more… Bookmarked – and I’ll certainly give it a try. I’m sitting here at a T1 connection anyway, so that should work. Thanks for the info! If you collect more experience, could you share them?
“5 Bucks per months sounds very reasonable. The most services that I know of charge a LOT more”
Yeah, Thomas, I know. I was looking at online backups and the charged by the GB. All seemed to average around $100/GB per year, if I remember correctly. So to backup of 75 GB it would cost me about $7,500/year, or $625/month. Mind you this is for the ‘professional level’ backups for companies. The ‘consumer level’ backups start at a low of $4.95 (Mozy) on up. To me, a backup is a backup. As long as I can restore, it worked!
Here are some comparisons of online backups.
Thanks for posting your experience with them Paul. I have looked at them in the past, but always wondered about the speed. I know it ‘works in the background’ but the speed of recovery is a real concern. 4 GB (1 flash card!) in 20 hrs is probably too slow for me, even though download speeds should be much faster.
Backing up to a drive you can keep offsite is certainly faster, but more expensive per GB.
Mozy sounds like a good plan for your photo backup, Paul. Just curious, does anyone back up favorite photos on high-quality CDs? I bought a zippered CD holder, and I label the spine with the dates and/or topics, and store on my office bookshelf. I’ve been thinking of moving them to our travel trailer, though–much safer in the event of a house fire. Thanks for the reminder to think ahead. It would be a tragedy to lose all this work.
@Paul: Thanks for the link…going to go through it!
@Photo Buffet: I used to use CDs, but they are a bit soo small for a decent, regular backup. So now I’m using transportable harddrives, actually stored in 2 different houses.
An alternative to good CDs might be DVD-RAMs, which are supposed to be safer than DVDs, which more often than not start developing problems after a couple of months/years…
Always good to hear about people who actually think about back ups!! I have looked into iDrive, iBackup, data deposit box, xdrive, ebackups, and mozy. They all seem to have their pros and cons. But doing online backups sure is a great way to do backups. Heck, I get tired of talking to clients about all the data they lost when their computer crashed. How nice is it to have something that automatically and securely backs up data for people? Couple that with a nice, easy user interface and most people would be set. I think as internet speeds increase these types of backups are really going to catch on. It’s sooo convenient!