Mozy to the rescue – a review of online backup

I’ve written a few times about online backup services and options.  I have setup Peer to Peer backup for a friend of mine using Crashplan, but primarily for my own use, I use Mozy.  I also setup a Mozy account for my good friend Tammy  to keep her photos and other files backed up on an aging eMachine desktop.  Shortly before Thanksgiving, the eMachine died an unceremonious death.   Initally alarmed, her daughter asked “Oh no! What about all the photos?”  Tammy, unworried about it says, “Don’t worry, Philip set something up for that – its all protected.”  Mozy to the rescue.

Literally, what better advertisement for Mozy could there be?  Or really for any online backup service?  That is the beauty of them – you set them and forget them and when the time comes, the only important thing you need to remember is your username and password to recover everything.

After talking it over, Tammy and her husband decided to pick up new computers on Black Friday and I setup those up the following week.  The first thing I installed upon booting up the system was Mozy and after installing, restore was as simple as choosing which files to restore (all of them) and then clicking the button.  A few short hours later, all the files were restored and Tammy was back in business.

There were a few things that cropped up.  First, the original eMachine computer was Windows XP and the replacement was Windows 7, so the default user directories had changed.  Upon restore, the files were place in a long folder hive of the original folder names.  That was easy to cleanup by moving the files.

The second thing was that little of Tammy’s data was resident on the computer.  They use email through HTC (my employer) and so all of their email is stored in Google’s cloud – so that didn’t need to be restored.  As a matter of fact, the GMail interface for sccoast.net made it very simple to switch to.  They no longer use a desktop email client.  One of them mentioned that they get lots of spam in this account, so I took a few minutes to create some filter rules to move a lot of the bulk offers they were receiving into subfolders in the webmail.  This cleaned up the Inbox to a useable form and moved all their coupons and offers into a separate folder.  With 7GB+ of data storage, nothing had to be deleted – just moved out of the way.

Required Disclosure:
The opinions expressed here are strictly personal opinions authored by Philip Sellers, an employee of HTC (Horry Telephone Cooperative, Inc.) and/or its subsidiaries.  Any reference to, discussion of, or content regarding HTC and/or its subsidiaries has not been reviewed, approved, or authorized by HTC and/or its subsidiaries before such content is posted and does not represent HTC and/or its subsidiaries or its views and opinions in any way.