Mac backups done online by Mozy
By Jonathan Schlaffer
OSX may be the most reliable operating system on the planet but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have backups lying around. You could image your existing installation to a DVD; you could backup only your important files which could be put on just about any storage medium or maybe backup to an external hard drive or use Mozy.
Brad Linder of Download Squad took a look at Mozy for Mac OSX 10.4 or later. Mozy was previously only available to Windows users but they now have a version available to Mac users.
Mozy is compatible with both Intel and PowerPC based Macs and offers up to 2GB of free storage and all it takes to get unlimited storage is a $4.95 per month fee. With a two year backup plan you get three months free, not bad if you ask me.
However, Mozy Free and Mozy Unlimited are available for personal use only and should not be used in business or enterprise environments. Businesses are advised to look at MozyPro. Fees for MozyPro are $3.95 per license for one computer and 50 cents per gigabyte of storage per month.
The only problem with backing up online is the transfer speed; I don’t want to even guess on how long the first backup would take if doing the whole hard drive, right now I have about 50GB to backup… I won’t even venture a guess on how long that would take.
I think I’ll stick to disc mirroring and local backup solutions. What good does 2GB of backups do anyway? That wouldn’t even be my music library much less anything useful. To get the most out of Mozy, I’m afraid you’ll just have to swallow the $4.95 monthly fee.
Of course, I’ve seen nothing on the site to actaully prevent business users from signing up for Mozy Free or Mozy Unlimited except that MozyPro offers a few more features that should appeal to the business and entperprise types. Mozy Free would be almost useless for business purposes so I guess that’s kind of a “passive” preventention. It also prevents a good deal of home users from using it too, I’m still trying to figure out how 2GB is a useful amount of storage.
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April 28th, 2007
I have a varied back-up plan. My most critical data (personal data and settings plus a few crtical data folders) goes to my .mac accont and an external hard drive on a daily basis. This is done using “Backup” which does incremental back-ups. This amounts to a little over 500 Mb.
My remaining files are backed up on a weekly basis to an external drive.
Music is backed up monthly to an external drive and Photos are backed up after each session to another external hard drive. As my photo archive will soon be to large to store on the drive of my MBP yet another hard drive lies in wait.
I burn the master images to dvd and store them offsite in my workshop.
Should my house be burgled or burn down my most important data is stored elsewhere. A couple of hours with a new Mac and I am up and running,