Online Backups: Mozy, a First Look

Whether you’re shooting for yourself or working for someone else, backing up your pictures in some way is crucial. Hard drives die, and if you don’t have any kind of back up… there goes your family vacation or your latest client’s photoshoot.

I’ve got a desktop and a laptop that I work with, and I have a 2 terabyte external hard drive (2tb Fantom Drive) that I back everything up on. I wanted another layer of backups after this, and I was looking into various options – DVDs, another external hard drive, etc.

The problem with DVDs is that I have a lot of files… and it will take a lot of DVDs to back them up. I’ve got over 100gb of pictures/files from last years yearbook, another 100gb of personal documents/music/pictures, and I’ll have another 1-200gb from next year’s yearbook and so on. That’s a lot of DVDs to copy and keep track of.

I could buy another 2tb external hard drive, and for another $130 I could have two copies of everything. But, this other hard drive would still be sitting on my desk at home. In the unlikely event of a theft/natural disaster, I’d be SOL.

So I thought about online storage. I was a bit skeptical at first, but after some research I decided that Mozy might be a good choice.

Overview: What You Get

When you sign up for Mozy, you install a backup application on your computer. You choose what documents you want to backup, and it’ll run in the background to send those documents to the server. You can easily pick and choose what you want to backup, and you can set a bunch of restrictions on when Mozy will run (i.e. at night, when you’re computer is idle, etc) so that the backup process doesn’t get in the way of your normal work.

As for storage, there are two options. A free account gets you 2gb of storage. If you take a lot of pictures, that’s nothin. The other option is to get an “Unlimited” account, which costs you $4.95 a month. You can also save money by signing up for longer terms, but I’m not ready for that yet… a month to month test run for $5/month is fine with me.

If you need your files restored, you can look through a kind of pseudo Windows Explorer, find the file/folder you want, specify where you want them to go (or send them back to their original location), and let it go to work downloading. Simple enough.

Is It Really Unlimited?

When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Unlimited is big. That could be expensive. So can it really be unlimited for $4.95/month?

I wondered the same thing, so I dug around for some answers. I found a review with a nice conversation in the comments that suggests that both Mozy and one of its main competitors, Carbonite, will allow you to store upwards of a terabyte of information. I think that is reasonable. I’d probably look to eventually store 1 to 2 tb of information (the capacity of my external hard drive).

If business starts booming and I find myself with terabytes upon terabytes of picturess, then I’d probably invest some cash in more external hard drives and come up with a more sophisticated back up system. But, for my current needs, 1 to 2 tb sounds fine.

How Long Does It Take?

The biggest problem with an online storage solution is that you have to get the stuff to the server. At the moment, I’m looking to start off with about 250gb of data. That’s a lot. And it will take a long time to upload.

Today, I signed up for a free account to test out how long it takes to upload and download (restore) files from Mozy. I picked a handful of folders that totaled just under the 2gb limit (1.9gb, 1160 files) and I set it to work.

Uploading that collection took about 2 and a half hours. I’ve got a Cable connection that’s always worked pretty well. Based on this, it looks like something in the neighborhood of an hour or so per gigabyte. That’s not bad moving forward, since I would rarely have more than a few gigabytes of extra info at any given time (i.e. a memory card worth of photos). After an event or a shoot, I could backup the images to my external hard drive, set Mozy to run, and the new stuff would be on the servers by morning.

It is, however, a big time investment up front. I’m starting off with about 250gb of data, so if I sign up for an unlimited account, that’ll take somewhere in the neighborhood of 250-300 hours (10 to 12 days) to upload. Yowza. Two weeks?

As for restoring info, it takes a lot less time to download than it does to upload. I restored that same info to my desktop in just about an hour. That works out to about a half hour per gigabyte. Reasonable. But, again, if you’re hard drive crashes and you’re downloading everything, you’ll be at it for a while.

Bottom line – I’m Gonna Try It

After reading about it and testing out the free account, I think I’m going to give it a go. I’m definitely not ready to commit to a 2 year subscription, but I’d be happy to pay for a month or two to see how things go.

I can store all of my info offsite. It’ll take a while to get started, but once the initial chunk of data is uploaded it’ll be manageable going forward. It might take a while to recover the data, but I’m really not looking forward to ever needing to download the info. Just like insurance, it’s something you buy and something you hope you’ll never need. And I can always go in and selectively restore one or two folders if I need something right away and can’t wait a few days for the whole download to finish.

I’ll check back in after a few weeks of the unlimited service, and share how it’s going.