Backup software for the home: A review of Mozy

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 3^rd 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.

Web Serendipity

Sometimes you can find gold nuggets in the rough. The nice thing about the web is that you can share these nuggets and everybody can benefit. Let me tell you about two that I have found recently. I enjoy travel and photography, and the web is an ideal way to make armchair visits around the globe. Unfortunately most web sites describing places are worse than useless: pictures scarcely larger than postage stamps, often lots of adds, and little useful information.

Enter Flickr and Wikipedia.

While reading an article on the BBC website about Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, I was fascinated by the stone carvings. Unfortunately the pictures on the BBC web site were too small. Now, one thing I have noticed is how useful Flickr and Wikipedia are when you want to see travel pictures of a place. Look up Rosslyn Chapel  on Flickr and you will see lots of pictures taken by several people. Many of these are full resolution 2000 pixels across or larger. So if you want to look around at almost any place on the globe, just enter that name in Flickr. Most of the time you will find somebody has posted some pictures about that place, and those pictures will often give you a far better idea about the place that any tourist or commercial web site can do.

Recently an opportunity to visit the east shore in Maryland came up, and a friend suggested St Michael's as a destination. Googled web sites on St Michael's had little of interest. Then I tried St Michaels in Wikipedia - what a difference. One of the really great things about Wikipedia is that most of the pictures include links to full size images.

I don't think that using Flickr and Wikipedia as travel resources was something that could have been foreseen. But these are good examples of quite unexpected serendipitous benefits that sometimes surface.