Although PCs are shipping with huge data storage, few people back-up their data properly. I imagine that there are millions of people that don’t even back-up their photos, instead entrusting the security of their memories to a bunch of precise, high-speed components that require just the smallest piece of dust to cause total failure.
I regularly back-up everything that I’d be devastated to lose to two external USB drives. When I say “regularly”, I mean “when I can be bothered to plug them in”. I always back-up after a photo-shoot, and then again after processing the images, but my day-to-day “hobby” photography might remain on my laptop for a few days before I get the back-up done.
This is where Mozy comes in. For a very reasonable $4.95 a month they offer unlimited on-line storage. They also offer a free account with a 2GB limit. Two gigabytes may well be plenty or most people, especially if the digital camera only comes out on holiday and at parties, so there’s little excuse for not trying them out. For more serious photographers, amateur or professional, £3.40 a month is small beer. I appreciate that you can pick up a 1TB drive from PC World for less than £100, but that leaves you with the job of securing the drive away from your home or office.
I’ve installed the free version, giving me 2GB of on-line storage. It’s nowhere near enough (about 2% of what I need), but so far it looks to be very good.
Installation of the application took about 5 minutes, including download of the 8MB set up file. Configuration of the software (user name & password, file/directory selection) took about two minutes, and off it went. I backed up about 260MB (My Documents excl. photos and music, Thunderbird email, FireFox bookmarks), which took about 30 minutes. That involved created the encrypted back up set and transferring it to the web server.
The utility can be configured to run on schedule, or when your PC is idling, so it shouldn’t interfere with your work/gaming/ browsing and so on.
Restoring looks to be a breeze. The utility installs itself in to My Computer, giving you a virtual drive on to your backups, so you can find previous versions from with in the familiar Windows Explorer interface. When browsing your on-line back-up sets the path in the Explorer address bar is the same as what you’d normally see when browsing local files, but has the addition of “(all files on MozyHome servers)” at the end of the path.
To restore a file or directory you simply browse to it, right-click and then choose “Open”, “Explore”, “Restore” or “Restore To”. “Restore” will copy the file back to its original location, whereas “Restore To” gives you the standard “Save As” dialog so you can choose where to put it.
Now, I’ve only done one back-up so far, but my early impression is that it’s very well done. I have an extensive technical background but find that I can’t be bothered with manual configuration or complex set-up any more, so this is ideal. It’s purely point & click, it’s fast, and it’s unobtrusive. Apart from the SysTray icon you won’t know it’s running.
“What happens when these companies go bust?” Not many companies go bust, especially those with a good product. I’m not advocating using Mozy as your only back-up, but for automated off-site I think it’s ideal. I won’t be stopping my usual back-ups to two USB drives, one of which lives in the car, but having to remember to take the back-up drives off-site becomes less critical.
Considering it’s free for 2GB I recommend you try it, even if you just test it with non-critical files for a few weeks.