21 Mar 2009
I Love My Mozy! (Updated)
It’s this time of the year again… No, I don’t mean tax time, it’s time to renew my Mozy subscription. That of course requires that I rethink my commitment: Do I want to subscribe to the service for another year? Do I get my money’s worth out of my subscription? Unlike with other services (e.g. cell phone plans, cable TV, …) this is actually an easy one: Mozy is the best thing that ever happened to my backup needs (that really cheap DAT tape drive that I bought about 12 years ago is a close second). There is really no question if or why I should renew.
I take a lot of pictures, and of course these pictures are digital. If something should happen to the data that I store locally, I need a reliable off-site backup. I used to keep a backup disk in my office, but it just got too cumbersome to always carry the disk back and forth and to update it frequently enough. Mozy takes care of all that. Automatically.
After the initial setup, it only requires me to check every now and then that all the important directories are covered. I also do occasional restores, just to make sure that my data is there – my assumption is that a partial restore is sufficient to verify that that’s the case.
My only complaint was that whenever a backup was running, it saturated my Internet connection, but since I figured out how to throttle the upload bandwidth that Mozy will use, that’s no problem anymore. It’s a configuration setting that I just did not notice at first.
Just for the record, I’m using Mozy on a Mac, but I assume that the Windows software is as reliable as the one that I’m using.
If you want to give Mozy a try, here are a few links. I even have a coupon code for you that’ll save you a few bucks: Use the code APRIL when you sign up for one of the non-free plans. Just type the code into the referral box at sign up to get a 10% discount. If you just want to give it a try, use the free plan. That allows you to get a feeling for what Mozy is, and how (well) it works. You have 2GB of storage space.
These are affiliate links, so I get some kickback from Mozy, but I would not recommend the service if I would not be completely satisfied with it. You can trust me on that.
