Zyaga Writing about whatever the hell I want, cuz it's the Interwebz!

Online Backup Service – Mozy

Far too many people in the world don’t have a “backup plan” and wouldn’t understand what you are saying if you brought it up. Backing up your important data seems like a tedious task that should be left for “guru’s” and “geeks” somewhere out in the interwebs, right? Wrong.

Unless you’re in a corporate company where some automated server takes care of all data backup and recovery for you, you’re left dealing with the issue yourself. You’re pretty much guaranteed not to get support from your company for your home PC’s either. So, it’s more than likely that you’re going to have to deal with this issue at some point. You basically have four options.

1. Backup your data online using some form of backup service(like Mozy).
2. Backup your data to an external drive.
3. Combination of 1 & 2.
4. Don’t do anything and be one of the millions of people who lose all their hard work because of laziness.

Now, I know you might get a bit upset at me basically calling you lazy, but don’t. I’ve often not used a backup service myself. I use to maintain my own “remote” backups, but after awhile when I reinstalled at one point, it got to the point that I just stopped doing it altogether. However, just recently I started thinking about what if I lost it all? It’s a very depressing thought to think about, but it has a high probability of eventually happening. I don’t need everything that I have on my PC, but all of my work content and projects that I’ve spent far too much time on… would simply go to waste.

What is thing you call ‘Mozy’?

That’s when I decided to start researching about what kind of backup services were available to me. I stumbled across Mozy, while searching on the internet and found it to be quite appealing. After reading several in depth reviews I found, I decided to give the service a try. Mozy costs $5 a month for unlimited backup, but they have a free “trial” service that simply limits you to a total of 2 GB. To get any more space than that, you have to sign up for their service.

I understand that many people will simply look for a free solution to their backup dilemma and while that’s not a horrible idea, the phrase “You get what you pay for”, comes to mind. Considering Mozy is only $5 a month, that’s not a very bad price to pay per month for this task to remain out of your mind and taken care of.

Versioning – What it does and why it is important

Basically, when you upload your files to Mozy the very first time, it creates a version “base”, so to speak. The next time it does a backup, it simply uploads the changes that were made to your PC and it increments the version. This allows for two very important features to take place:

1. You can go back to any version you’ve backed up, at any time.
2. Only changes are uploaded(backed up) to the server, not the entire data set each time. This saves tons of bandwidth and time.

Not all hosting services offer the ability to version backups, but most do. Just make sure that the one you go with does, it’s a very helpful and almost utterly necessary feature to have.

The Big Picture

Mozy has the ability to run in the background, when you tell it to. You can tell it to automatically start backing up your data after you’ve been idle, for lets say 20 minutes, and then can even control the “throttle” as to how much resources Mozy takes up as it is running. If you’re like me, I just tell it to run when I go to bed, by morning it’s all said and done. This simplicity, combined with the amazingly cheap price has drove me to use Mozy exclusively. Maybe I’ll find a better solution for backup, but for right now, Mozy handles everything I need it to do.

If you have any questions about Mozy, feel free to send me an E-mail or comment on this article, and I’ll be sure to answer them the best that I can. If it’s relevant enough, I’ll even add it to the article.