Mozy Remote Backup

Several months ago I lost my primary hard drive on my P.C. died and of course I had no backup strategy. Some of the data I lost is irreplaceable. Once I got my new computer I vowed to myself that it wouldn’t happen to me again. I needed a backup strategy, one that I could set up and then forget about, with the knowledge that it was taken care of. Oh, and it needed to be free or extremely inexpensive, because I’m cheap like that. The solution I chose was Mozy Online Backup.

The first step is to sign up for an account on Mozy’s web site. You get 2 gb of backup space for free or for $4.95/month you get unlimited backup. The next step is to download and install the Mozy software. Once complete, you are ready to select the files you want to back up.

Here is a look at the dialog used for choosing the files you want Mozy to back up:

As you can see I’m not using a lot of my space at the moment. I am mostly backing up my writing documents and other similar data. I had been backing up my photos, but stopped doing that as the backup took too long (the only drawback I have seen). I’m running the lowest bandwidth DSL and my upload speeds aren’t that great. I have backed up my images to CD and that will have to do for now. Without the images, the backup is extremely fast.

The first time your backup runs, Mozy will copy all of your files to your storage space on their server. After that, Mozy only copies those files that have change or those that are new, greatly speeding up the backup process.

On the scheduling side, there are several different options with Mozy. You can specify a certain time or day to have your files backed up, or as I have configured my system you can have Mozy do an automatic backup if your system has been idle for a certain period of time. Again, Mozy only backs up data that has changed or that is new.

Overall, I am very happy with Mozy. It is free, it is reliable, and I don’t have to think about it. I would like to test it out on a higher speed connection, just to see how it would perform with larger amounts of data.