Mozy Remote Backup
So earlier in the week I had Verizon FiOS installed and went with their 15Mbps down 2Mbps up package. I decided to try out an online backup utility now that I have a decent upload connection and did some research for what the best tool would be. I have all my files backed up locally with a RAID 1 setup but wanted another solution in case that drive setup was ever damaged or stolen.
Ars Technica has a great review of online backup solutions. In their review they looked at four great utilities: Carbonite, Mozy Remote Backup, XDrive, and Iron Mountain’s Connected Backup/PC service. I decided to go with Mozy because it had the best price/storage ratio ($4.95 per month for unlimited) and also offers multiple encryption methods which was a definite plus for me because it meant I didn’t need to first encrypt files using Truecrypt which would make it more likely that files wouldn’t be backed up regularly. The other utilities supported encryption too, but didn’t meet the price/storage ratio that Mozy has.
When you install the Mozy software you have the option of choosing an encryption key supplied by them or you can create your own. I chose to use my own and used KeePass to generate a 500 character key. Mozy does a nice job of warning you about using your own key; if you lose it they have no way of getting the key for you so proceed with caution. During the initial install Mozy by default chooses the most common places people want to backup, the My Documents folder and their web bookmarks. Later you have the option of using expert mode and adding your own folders for it to backup. The initial backup can take a few hours, I’m currently backing up a 1.8GB folder and it’ll take roughly 6 hours. Before Mozy uploads any files it uses 448-bit Blowfish encryption then connects to their servers using 128-bit SSL encryption. After the first backup Mozy only uploads files that have been changed so uploading is much faster.
Mozy offers four different restore options to choose from: If you need to restore a few files you can just right click the folder and select Restore Files in Folder, there’s a Web Restore option which is handy for downloading files onto a computer that doesn’t have the Mozy software install and the data restored is less than 20GB, or on the system you have Mozy software installed it creates a virtual drive that allows you to easily see all the files it has backed up to choose what you need. They also offer a pay option which you can choose and they will burn all your data onto one or more DVD’s and ship it to you with FedEx.
All in all I’m very satisfied with the Mozy remote backup solution and its nice having the software automatically run whenever a file has changed so I don’t need to keep track of it and risk having an outdated file stored.
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Comments
yea its definitely worth it, especially if you have a lot of keep-sake items on your computers, such as digital photographs or important documents. the sucky part is the initial transfer, which can take forever.
~Mike
To comment #1, Sorry you had trouble with Mozy.
So far my experience has been excellent. Right now Mozy is running and is only using about 30% of the CPU and yesterday when I had it backup a 7GB folder, it only took 12 hours.
I don’t think Mozy will let you down. It is the best online backup solution I have ever used. And that $5 unlimited storage deal is unbeatable!
oh…and the other thing, did you know that here in Australia, we actually have a bandwidth limit per month. So sometimes downloading the backed up data can eat up all their data limit. (Lucky I got 48GB:)
Yeah luckily here we don’t have any hard limits to the amount of bandwidth you can use. Some ISP’s do have a soft limit, usually around 200GB, where they’ll contact you to see why you’re using so much.
I wasn’t aware of this initially and its not that big of a deal, but Mozy limits the upload speed for home users to 1Mbps. High enough for most users, but with FiOS I have 2Mbps up so would have been nice to get a faster speed.
They allow faster speeds for business accounts, but you also pay a higher price.
hi
I had a bit more then a bit 3 GB’s to backup. I have a fast internet connection (1500 Kbit/s upload), but mozy told me, that it takes 4 days for that, with an upload speed of 16Kbit/s (!). Meanwhile the two mozy services running in the background consumed together more than 40 % of both the 2.2 Ghz processors (!).
Since 3 days I tried to upload the files but somewhere in between mozy stopped uploading with an unspecified error saying there is an firewall problem. Ok- lets have a look at the log file: empty.
Ok I tried it again, and again, and again, but now I finally found the solution:
1. http://www.mozy.com
2. login
3. delete account