I consider myself to be an IT professional after spending most of my career in IT. A while ago I realized that my backup strategy on my own home PC was not very professional. Much like security, backup is a layered approach, designed to reduce risk. This means you should not just stop at one backup solution. I have a Seagate USB backup drive, but the problem is that if there is something like a house fire, you can lose your backups. Since we keep all our family videos and photos on the PC, the thought of losing all of that in a house fire was just too painful to bear. After some research, I signed up with Mozy in June 08. One of the appeals of Mozy was the unlimited personal backups for just $5 per month because I have over 800 GB of data.
Fast forward about 2 years. A few months ago my XP home computer required rebuilding because it was the easiest way to resolve problems that had developed. It was also an opportunity to increase the size of the hard disk. Also, although I had two backups, the most prudent approach was to buy a new hard drive, and not reformat the old one. Then the unexpected happened – first the Seagate drive demanded that I create new partitions. It has lost all my data! No idea why this happened, but nothing I could do would get my data back. Then when I set up Mozy on the new hard drive, about 75% of my files seemed to have vanished. Although Mozy’s documentation makes moving your Mozy account to a new PC look simple, it really isn’t. In my case, the old hard drive was installed as a 3rd drive on the PC, and I was able to copy all the files across to the new drive, and no files were lost. And when Mozy was doing the initial backup of the new hard drive, it found most of these files on the Mozy system. Perhaps they were not lost after all, but they certainly weren’t visible in the recovery pane. My suggestion is that if you are moving Mozy from one system to another; do not delete the old system in Mozy. Rather create a new system on Mozy, and only once you have all your files on the new system, delete the old one from Mozy. It will cost you $5 per month extra, but at least you won’t lose any data. While prudence had paid off (i.e not reformatting the old drive), it was a bit sobering to think that both backups had failed.
