FYI, if you want to back up more than 33GB, it's cheaper to use Mozy. Not affiliated with them, just a happy user.

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I've tried Mozy a couple of times and gave up on it. The Mac client is buggy as hell and slow. It won't let me max out my upstream bandwidth. I'm lucky if I can get it to upload at 20 k/sec. And often it refuses to upload at all.


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I second Mozy. The Mac client is still in beta, but the latest version seems to do exactly what it's supposed to. Also, it is specifically a backup service, so they will send you DVDs of your data, if you request them (at a cost, of course). A colleague lost her hard drive and was able to recover nearly everything.

---
Double-Tongued Word Wrester: a growing dictionary of old and new words from the fringes of English. http://www.doubletongued.org/

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Can anyone else comment on Mozy? Recent twitterings [tweetscan.com] have been mixed.

That said, Mozy seems like the most cost-effective option [oreilly.com] for home users.

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Mozy had some issues with earlier versions of their Mac agent; I've found the recent build (0.9.0.0 26912) to be pretty consistent and no longer hangs doing the backups.

Of course, they offer a free 2GB option which will cover most non-media data within reason; sign up with my referral link below and we BOTH earn an extra 256MB of storage capacity! Follow the link, click on MozyHome then click on the MozyHome Free link to sign up.

Mhttps://mozy.com/?code=SVU4AA

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I unsecond your second.

For larger amounts of data (>100 GB), Mozy is still too buggy to be useful. It gives all sorts of spurious error messages and never seems to complete a backup. Maybe once it's out of beta, who knows...but it's buggy as hell right now.

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I add a caveat to the unseconding of the seconding.

You really shouldn't be backing up 100GB + of data online.

Media files, your operating system, and applications are better backed up via other forms of off-site backup. (Physically writing to another drive, or optical disk, and taking that media off site, would be the better method.)

Online backups are best for critical data that changes frequently.

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That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
In your bandwidth starved little country, online backup might not be ideal.

I have roughly 20Mbps upstream -- 25 on a good day.
There's absolutely no reason I shouldn't back up my 140GB photo library to an off-site service via the Internet.

Yes, the first backup takes a bit of time (16 hours in this case), but everything after that is a differential backup, and takes very little time, even in the event that I go shooting a few GB of photos.

Stop being ignorant, and stop trying to hinder progress.

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I was using mozy and although it saved me once, what a pain to do a full system restore.

I was backing up about 40GB which took about a month to finally complete despite the fact that I have 5Mbps upload on my FiOS connection. I use S3 just as the tip suggests now and I constantly see 5Mbps throughput. (just to check I tried Mozy again and it was still way under 1Mbps)

Mozy was always backing up more data then I thought it needed to, meaning more data then had changed since the last backup and combined with the slow speeds caused backups to fail all the time.

But in the end the real reason I stopped using it was the restore process is ridiculous. I had to sign into their site and request the files. It took almost 24 hours for them to have my files ready. Then I had to download 100 dmg files, mount them one by one and copy my data back to where it was.
This took me a good part of a day.

So now, I use Time Machine for regular backups and I use s3 for weekly backups. I only keep one version on S3. I still have about 40GB and my cost is about the same. And with S3 I can copy one file at anytime using S3 Broswer or sync my entire directory structure back with one s3sync command. The ease of backup and restore combined with the S3's ability to max out my 20/5 FiOS connection makes it worth the hassle to setup and price.

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you can do the same w/ Gmail and it doesn't cost you a ¢

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I'm surprised nobody's mentioned JungleDisk which does exactly this (plus a whole lot more) and works great on the Mac.

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It mounts your S3 bucket as a WebDAV volume, so every process on the system has read-write access to it. This is practically the same as running everything as root. Avoid, unless you don't care about the integrity of your data.

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anyone try using CrashPlan? Seems like a very good program, and does the same thing as Mozy (and more!!!) but not at a flat rate.

The benefit is that you can send it to other computers (including other family/friends computers) all encrypted.

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Last time I checked, the Mozy Mac client didn't back up the resource forks of files - to me that makes it worse than useless. I'm trying out Jungledisk at the moment but haven't yet got round to checking it with Backup Bouncer to see what metadata it does or doesn't store. One comment is that I've just had my first bill from Amazon and the biggest charge was not for the storage or transfer but for the list/put requests - it's still very cheap though.

Anyone have any comments on the read/write access criticism? Seems to me this is just the same as backing up to a normal disk. If you only mount Jungledisk while running the backup, and quit other apps first, this shouldn't be a problem should it?

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Actually, as of version 0.9, we support
resource forks, symbolic links and bundles correctly.

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It's worth noting that as of the last few releases you can completely disable the WebDAV volume and just use Jungle Disk for automatic backup and restore.

Most users consider the WebDAV volume to be a very useful feature however, as it allows you to use pretty much any backup or sync software you want with Amazon S3.

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We love S3. So much so that we will be adding S3 as a possible destination for CrashPlan customers this year. That said, there are a few points we've discovered when working with their APIs that affect using them as a backup service.

1. Guarenteed restore. The problem with S3 is once you send your data there, you have to TRUST it's still in working order. Want to verify it's good? You have to do a restore, and that costs money. CrashPlan intelligently tests your backup archive at the destination automatically to validate your backup archive is still in good working order. You can't do this with S3.

2. It's cheaper. Amazon charges you every time you move data to and from their data center. There are no monthly fees with CrashPlan if you back up to your own destination (a friends, computer, the office, a neighbor). Our central storage is a flat $0.10 / GB / month, no bandwidth charges, also cheaper than amazon.

3. No limits. Amazon has a 4GB file size limit. CrashPlan has none. We'll leverage our engine to circumvent this limit, but most (all?) products today currently have a 4GB limit I think.

4. Better performance. S3's limited API resulting in poor performance. CrashPlan has better compression, less bandwidth.

5. Better security. With CrashPlan you know where your data is. It's not in the "cloud" you trust to work. Some people are ok with this, for me personally, I like knowing my macbook pro is backed up to my old XP box in the basement of my house & in our rack at the office.

S3 is an awesome service, but it's limited API limits what you can accomplish in terms of backup & restore. I think they're a great addition to a backup strategy, but I personally would not make them my primary off-site strategy.

2nd or 3rd tier? Absolutely.

~Matthew




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