For the past few months, I’ve been using Mozy as an online back-up solution. But after they changed their subscription rates to eliminate the unlimited storage option, I decided to immediately dump Mozy. In light of the changes, I wrote an overview of other online backup solutions for Associated Content, and now I’m wondering… what other services still offer an unlimited online backup?

Keep reading…

A couple months ago, I signed up for Mozy Home Online Backup. I was a bit skeptical at first that they could deliver an unlimited amount of storage for $4.99… but for a while they did.

Unfortunately, that all stopped with an e-mail I received on Tuesday…

“Thanks for being a valued Mozy subscriber. For the first time since 2006, we’re adjusting the price of our MozyHome service and wanted to give you a heads up. As part of this change, we’re replacing our MozyHome Unlimited backup plan and introducing the following tiered storage plans:

50 GB for $5.99 per month (includes backup for 1 computer)
125 GB for $9.99 per month (includes backup for up to 3 computers)

You may add additional computers (up to 5 in total) or 20 GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.”

Will I be using Mozy anymore? Nope. I cancelled my account this evening. I like the peace of mind of having an automatic online backup, but I also like having a reasonable price. My backup size has ballooned to over 425 gb. That would peg my cost at about $40/month and rising…

For the moment, let’s ignore the comparison between Mozy and other online backup providers. I can buy a 2tb external hard drive for less than $120. At that rate, I could buy an extra hard drive every 3 months and have a pretty high level of redundancy. Or, I could string some of them together in a raid array. I could probably also store one at a friends house and backup to it over the Internet.

So am I going to pay $40 a month to upload my files to Mozy? Absolutely not. Sorry. See ya later, Mozy.

So I recently re-installed Windows on my computer. I also recently posted that Mozy didn\’t appear to recognize my external hard drive as already being backed up after this re-install.

It turns out that there isn’t a problem after all… When I initially re-installed the computer and reloaded Mozy Home, it didn’t seem to recognize that there was already 300+gb of data backed up. The data was there; I could see it in the restore window. But it scanned my external hard drive and, I thought, started uploading all 300gb of data all over again. That would have taken forever!

A day later and partially through that initial re-upload, it magically sorted itself out. It uploaded some new data (~25gb of pictures) and then reported that it was done and all 350gb of data are safely backed up on the server. I need to look through the restore area over the weekend and check that everything is actually there and in one piece… but it seems for the moment like there isn’t a problem after all.

So, if you re-install Windows and keep files at the same location, Mozy will (hopefully) recognize that they are backed up and not send them all to the server again.

Maybe I did something wrong. But I don’t think so.  I’ve been using Mozy since the end of July, and this past week I’ve figured out one pretty significant problem with the system. When I re-installed Windows, I had to complete a new initial upload.

From time to time, I find it helps to re-install Windows, clean up the computer, and start from scratch. This gets rid of programs that have been partially uninstalled and left digital litter all over your registry. Although there’s software to try to do this type of clean up, I don’t think anything quite stands up to starting from a fresh slate. Keep reading…

From what I can tell? No.

Yesterday, I read an article on DPS about online backups, and one of the commenters recommended Crashplan over Mozy. Never used Crashplan, so I can’t comment. Reader said he had a horrible experience with Mozy, which is certainly possible, so I won’t comment.

But he also claimed that Mozy throttled your uploads to 10gb per day – in other words, Mozy artificially restricted you to uploading 10gb a day when you could easily upload more. The problem with this, of course, is that it takes much longer to upload an initial backup or any large change to your directory structure. This I can comment on, and from my experience it is patently untrue. Keep reading…

Between advising the yearbook at school, working with Olinda on her photography business, and taking pictures of my own, I’ve got a lot of pictures. Keeping them organized and backed up is critical, because I wouldn’t want to lose any of that data.

I’ve been toying around with different back-up procedures, and for the time being I’ve come up with something I like. So here, in a nutshell, is my the way that I process and back-up all of my pictures. Keep reading…

I woke up this morning, sat down at the computer, and was met with a pleasant surprise. Mozy had finally finished its initial backup.

Phew. 95,897 files and 287gb later. That wasn’t a lot…

It also didn’t take too incredibly long. I started the initial backup around midnight on July 31. It finished around midnight last night. That’s about 11 days, give or take, of constant transfer. There were also a few interruptions – due to an update that restarted my computer – which caused the backup to pause until I could log back in.

Now let’s see if it can keep up with the incremental back-ups on a daily basis…

So a little over a week ago, I decided to sign up for Mozy and back everything up online. I figured it would take a couple of weeks to upload everything, and it’s definitely taking a long time…

But my first gripe is that I can’t tell just how long that will take. If you take a look at the screenshot to the left, you’ll see the information screen that Mozy provides while a backup is in progress. It tells you how many files have been backed up and how many are left to go.

What’s missing? The size of all these files. I know Mozy has backed up 9800 files so far, but I also know it’s done a bunch of big video files. But I don’t know what’s left inside the other 86000 files waiting to be backed up.

This leaves me with no real way to estimate how long this will take. And that is a little bit annoying. Would it be so hard to give an estimate of the size of the remaining files as well?

The one problem I can think of is that Mozy does incremental back-ups. If a file changes, it’ll back up the changes and not upload the entire file again. So it might not be feasible to scan all of the files to determine how big that incremenetal backup is. Instead, the software might scan each file as it comes up for a backup and determine what to upload. But even an overestimate, based on the raw size of the files and not the actual amount of information uploaded, would be nice…

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.