theworldisgrey

Mozy - Remote Backup

Most people don’t realize the value of data backups until something goes wrong. The loss could be anything from the last few weeks of data to years worth of email, documents and records. Hard drives are not perfect, they will fail after a certain period of time. Even tapes, CD and DVD media have a limited life expectancy. Not to mention, the hassle required by managing all the tapes/discs.

A couple weeks ago, I started looking for an automatic way to back up my files remotely. I didn’t want the hassle of backing up to DVD and managing all the backups. Out of all the backup services Mozy was the most appealing. Even with the non-free account, its not very expensive.

With Mozy, everything is automatic. I set up the initial backup set and everything else is automatic. Every night Mozy will look for changed files within my backup set and send an incremental backup. Everything is encrypted with my own personal key (keys generated with Putty tools work). I only pay $4.95 per month per computer for unlimited storage space. Free accounts are limited to 2GB, much more than most other services.

I haven’t yet had to test Mozy in an actual disaster situation. But I have done single file restores to see how it works. Although it takes some time (3-5 minutes) to find the file, its very easy to use.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Life, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.