Until very recently, my backup strategy has been good, but too manual: I keep duplicate copies of everything (including photos, documents, etc) on multiple hard drives in my home and I have another set of drives that I rotate home from the office in order to maintain an off-site backup. ...I do use a Dell laptop so a sudden fire is always a possibility!
This is a pretty solid backup solution - so what's the problem? It depends on me to do it! And, as my wife will tell you, I have one of the worst memories going. The system depends on me to rotate those drives and I can tell you that I'm not always on top of it. In the event of a total disaster, I'll more than likely lose a few photos from my most recent shoot(s) & that's just not acceptable.
I've long wanted to set up an automated, online backup system for all of my files and photographs. I've considered a few options ranging from copying the data to one of my web hosting accounts (prohibitively expensive) to leaving a drive at a friend's house (which sucks because I'll need to call them whenever they forget to leave their PC on & I can't back up). Last week I signed up for Mozy, an online, automated backup system that lets you store an unlimited amount for $5 a month (they also offer a 2GB for free plan, but that won't help most shooters). My PC has been happily uploading ever since (it's going to take a while...) and so far the service seems to be pretty reliable.
UPDATE: Mozy has announced a monthly discount program! you can get 5% off your service if you use the code DECEMBER at checkout. -RRDI also considered a few other services, but most fell down when it came to price. Two of the front runners were Carbonite and iBackup. The former lost out due to the lack of ability to browse your backed up files online and the later lost out due to price. Also, neither of those services currently support Macs... I don't use one today, but I wouldn't want to have to change backup providers simply because I changed hardware.
Let's consider some of the finer points.
CAPACITY
Anyone who tells you that something is "unlimited" is not being entirely truthful - even SmugMug, who famously welcomed a new user who had over two terabytes of JPEGs would eventually balk at some point. The economics of the situation require that there must be some limit: the SmugMug CEO mentions in that thread that this would be "something like a $20,000 first-year commitment for us in terms of disk space, power, cooling, and physical space." Clearly no company can scale forever and remain afloat. SM took the guy on as a customer, but you can bet if his 2 TB was 20 TB there may have been a different outcome.
Anyway, the point of all of that rambling is that the service is almost certainly *not* unlimited - start chewing up terabytes of storage and they're likely to ask you to take your data elsewhere. I'm in the process of uploading several hundred GB, so I'll let you know how it works out! ...Which leads me to:
INITIAL UPLOAD
This is the longest part of the process. After you've downloaded and installed their software, the Mozy program will offer up a suggested backup plan which will select most users' personal data based on file type & location. I customized my profile a bit to include a media directory that's in an odd location and made sure that it is including all of my image directories. Then you hit "Start Backup" and Mozy will happily upload your data.
Now, depending on how much data you have and how fast (or slow) your internet connection is, this initial backup may take weeks or even months. I'm pushing several hundred gigs at a rate of just 320kbps - I'm most certainly on the "month+" plan. Still, the process just runs in the background and doesn't get in your way - I don't even notice a slowdown.
BANDWIDTH THROTTLE
Mozy's default settings only use most of your available upload capacity in order to prevent slowing down your other Internet browsing activities (which require a little bit of upload capacity in order to remain responsive). This is also important if you have other things using your Internet access such as a VOIP Telephone. It works great out of the box and should be fine for most users, but I needed a bit more fine tuning.
An advanced way to avoid sucking up all of your upstream bandwidth with your backups is to use the QoS, or Quality of Service, features built into your Internet Router. This isn't the place to go into specifics, but basically I told the router to give highest priority to data to and from my Internet Phone and web requests. This allows me to crank Mozy all the way up so that the upload completes as quickly as possible while not interfering with my VOIP phone or other web browsing. Check the manual that came with your router for details...
DATA SECURITY
One problem I've struggled with is how to protect my data from evil doers once it is stored somewhere physically outside of my home. With the removable drives I've been using the TrueCrypt software to encrypt everything on the drives - this way if someone swipes it from my office all they've got are random 1's and 0's instead of my personal documents and originals of my photographs.
Mozy uses a similar technique. The software encrypts all of your data locally and then transmits the encoded data over an https (secure http) connection to the Mozy servers. This ensures that all Mozy ever has to lose is your encrypted data - which won't be much use to anyone without your password. Here's an illustration of my current backup strategies with locks indicating how data is encrypted.
NEW FILES & AUTOMATIONThe Mozy software automatically scans your computer for new files which meet the profiles that you've set up. Whenever it finds a new or updated file, it will encrypt it and upload it to their servers. The best part is that all of this happens automatically - meaning that you can't forget to make a backup!
If you delete a file locally, it remains on the Mozy servers for a few weeks before it is purged from their systems.
RESTORING YOUR FILES
After Mozy has uploaded your files, you can restore some of all of them whenever you'd like. There are several ways to access your files including their web site, but the easiest method is probably the new "Mozy Remote Backup" icon that will appear in your "My Computer" view in Explorer.
Clicking on the Mozy disk will let you browse through all of the files and folders that exist on your Mozy space. Right-clicking on any on will allow you to restore that file to its original or a new location. Fortunately, since most Internet plans have download speeds which are *much* faster than uploads this will not take the extended amount of time required to the initial backup.
CONCLUSION
UPDATED: I've now been a Mozy user for several months & have been very happy with the service. While I've not needed to do a mass restore (and hopefully never will), I have "proved out the system" by pulling down a handful of files & checking them for correctness. The process was easy & the data was clean! I can officially say that Mozy is highly recommended. -RRD, 10/13
Do you back up your docs & photos? I 
1 comments:
I use Mozy as well although I think I'm going to upgrade to the unlimited account.
I work for EMC, who owns Mozy, and we don't get a discount so I'll be using the April discount mentioned in the blog!
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