Mozy

I’ve always had a huge problem when it came to backing up my personal data – it costs too much to do it right. Every time I buy some “system” for backing up, it’s always woefully inadequate. I’ve purchased tape drives, optical drives, and external hard drives in the past and it’s not possible to keep enough backup media around to ensure you can recover from a bad backup with the rate at which hard drive sizes are growing. Unfortunately, I’ve had an urgent feeling (call it geek’s intuition) the past few months that I really need to backup my data somehow. Enter Mozy, an online backup service for Windows and Mac (beta) acquired by EMC in October 2007.

I found this list of “Alternatives to Mozy” on their website. It’s funny because I’ve done most of them.

• Burn a new CD or DVD every Sunday night and store it at your brother-in-law’s office.
• Pay $200/year for an online backup service that uses old, mediocre software.
• Buy a $200 external hard drive and hope your office doesn’t burn down.
• Do nothing and don’t worry about backup. (We suggest closing your eyes, plugging your ears and repeating “I’m in my happy place, I’m in my happy place.”)
• Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend’s server over his DSL line.

So how does it work? Using the Mozy software, you define what data you would like to backup by directory, file type, last modified, etc. It even comes with a very comprehensive list of backup sets already defined. Once you setup a regular backup schedule, Mozy takes care of the rest. In the background, it will encrypt your data with 448-bit Blowfish encryption and send it to the Mozy servers via 128-bit SSL. You can either use the default Mozy key or supply your own, but if you lose your key your data is lost forever since no one will be able to decrypt it. If you use their key, they will not view the data you backup or sell your information (see privacy policy).

Once Mozy does the initial backup, it works in the background (set it and forget it) to detect files which have changed and sends only the blocks which have changed over the network. This will save storage space on their end and time and bandwidth for you. The good news is that both the CPU time used for encrypting and the network bandwidth can be throttled easily and flexibly. The Mozy software can even backup files which are currently open (locked) and backs up Outlook files (.pst files). Essentially, the whole thing is a block-level continuous incremental backup.

I initially signed up for the free MozyHome service with a 2GB quota just to try it out. It’s perfect if you just had a few files that you wanted to keep safe like your most important documents. However, I quickly found out that this would not be enough since my wife has 26GB just in digital photos she’s taken. The initial selection of files from the default backup sets came up to 89GB (I was able to trim this down to 69GB with some additional filters). Luckily, there is a MozyHome plan which is $4.95/mo per computer (you get 1 month free if you pay a year in advance and 3 months free if you pay two years in advance) for unlimited storage space. Yes, I said unlimited.

So Mozy’s been running in the background for a while and disaster strikes. How do you recover your data? If you’ve just accidentally modified a file you didn’t intend to, you simply right-click on the file in Windows Explorer and select “Restore Previous Version” and you can restore any version within the last 30 days. You can also access the “MozyHome Remote Backup” virtual drive in windows explorer and browse the files on the Mozy servers before restoring. If you need to restore files to a computer which doesn’t have the Mozy software installed, you can use the web-based restore. Finally, if the ultimate disaster strikes and you need a copy of all of your files and don’t want to download them, you can request that your data be burned to DVDs and shipped to you overnight. There is a fee for this service, obviously.

I already have an increased peace of mind knowing that my most critical documents and folders were backed up when I was trying out the 2GB quota. Now that I’ve gone to the unlimited, I will feel even better knowing that all of our family photos, music collection, and home videos will be safely stored with a company that is an expert in data storage.

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Tags: backup, online, emc, mozy, mozyhome, privacy, unlimited