The Quest for Reliable Backups - Online Backup

After becoming more and more frustrated with Time Machine, and knowing that off-site backups are a must, I've decided to continue my quest for trouble-free reliable backups.

My quest took me to Mozy. Mozy is an online backup service that is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, and Vista, and Mac OS X (10.4 and 10.5).

Mozy Home is free and allows you to backup 2 GB of data to their secure web servers.

Mozy Pro is $4.95 a month for unlimited backup.

So, I signed up for Mozy Home to test it out. They send you an email with a link to download a small program to install on your computer. The installation went smoothly on my Mac OS 10.4 server computer. I set it to backup my entire 4D Server folder and I threw some other files in there to backup as well. Mozy defaulted to backing up my Documents folder, iCal, Address Book, and Mail which I unselected to save space (since my server computer isn't used for anything else but 4D Server).

I also set it to backup automatically every day at 3:00 a.m. which was easy to do.

That was it. I think the whole process took me 10 minutes.

I closed the Mozy program and prayed it worked it the background.

This morning, I logged onto the Mozy web site to check to see if everything backed up ok, and ... it was all there! Wow! That was it? Unbelievable.

I know that today my data file will be modified, and tonight at 3:00 a.m. it will be backed up again. I guess I will check it a few times to make sure everything is working ok these next few weeks, but so far, this was truly easy.

Mozy encrypts all files before backup so everything stays safe. So, as of right now, Mozy seems like the way to go for off-site backups.

I plan to pay the $4.95 a month and backup my entire home Mac (which has my entire life on it). By the way, did you know that if your computer dies, all the music you paid for on iTunes is lost? Yep, it happened to me, and all my iTunes downloads were gone forever. If I had Mozy then, it would have paid for itself just by saving my music. Imagine that.....