One month and two days ago, I posted about my experience with online backup solution Mozy. I’d tried the product once before and been disappointed with the backup speeds, and so I abandoned it, only to begin again last month. After a month of backing up, I’ve almost got my initial 60GB plus a month’s worth of changes backed up – well, by the time I get home today anyways, it should be done.
As I’ve chronicled, I think the initial backup is the biggest challenge for all online backup solutions, Mozy included. My experience taking one month really isn’t that bad given a relatively slow upstream connection and 60GB plus of data to backup. The process was relatively easy, though I needed to throttle the bandwidth to keep my Internet connection usable while I was at home. Thanks to a comment on an earlier post, I was able to find that very hidden setting in the Mozy client.
Throttling the bandwidth solved one problem, but presented a new one – it took longer to completely my initial. Even with bandwidth throttled, it seemed to affect my normal activites online were degraded. So many nights, I’d stop the backup when I arrive home and start it back (when I didn’t forget) before going to bed.
All in all, I’m impressed. Its a nice product and the price is right. Even though I had the paid account for a year, its taken me to month 11 to actually let it back something up, so I get to renew my newly backed up account at the end of this month.
The feature that I liked most about this product is its smart filters. Out of the box, the configuration screen comes with a set of handy filters to easily pick and choose what to backup. For instance, if I’m a writer and I want to protect all my Word documents, just check the box for Word docs and whalla, its going to find those on the entire hard drive and back them up. And in my Mac version, it includes filters for iCal, Mail, Pages, Numbers, etc. out of the box. Its a very intuitive package and would be easy for any in-experienced user to use.
HTC has been looking into reselling the Mozy service to our residental customers, and after my experience, I can say that I fully endorse that option. I think this is a service that all users should have, even if not for all their data, for their critical data. As a matter of fact, I have several that are coming to mind right now that I should sign up for a free 2GB account. I guess I have a few emails to write and a few phone calls to make…
