BUH Blog

Mozy - Windows Backups

I can’t remember how I found it - but I stumbled on a nice service/software that I have needed for a long time. Mozy is a remote backup service. You download some software (yes, win-blows only), which runs in the background, and select the files you want backed up. Well, that is where the W A I T I N G begins - it is really slow the first time through. Why? Because it is packing up the files you selected and then shooting them over the internet to the Mozy servers. That took a couple of days. It will slow down transmission while you are working on your computer - but it is still apparent something is running. When you leave the PC alone - it is pretty quick - maxing out your bandwidth.

I forgot to mention - it is FREE for the first 2 GB - cool, huh? I went for the paid version, which is $4.95 a month - but you get 30 GB of backup storage. The biggest amount of data I have (not on any of my servers - on my Windoze PC) is my email files. That alone is like 3 GB of data, so I wanted to make sure I got that. Yeah, I could throw it on a CD… No, actually I can’t! It won’t fit - even with compression. And I don’t have a DVD burning in my PC. Backing up big files like that are a pain. After the initial slow backing up of files - now it seems to be doing DIFFs of the files and only making backups of the differences. Very nice.

Now, I have not tried to reconstitute any files yet - I guess I had better at some point in the near future. I may have a false sense of security, but so far Mozy seems to be a nice little service.