Family Find - Photo and Data Back up

For starters, I am receiving nothing from this company but as is my standard, I like to share things with you that we have found on our own and use because we LOVE them.

How many pictures have you taken since the dawn of the digital age?  According to my photos folder, I have over 80,000 images – yikes.

photo taken from the Mozy site

We’ve decided to go with Mozy as our off-site backup plan.  For the past many many years, we have had our “media” drive mirrored to another drive and that back up happens every Sunday night.  We feel pretty comfortable with that solution UNLESS the basement floods (which is where our file server is), or if our house burns down, or if something freakish happens and everything is wiped clean.  So, after much thought, we have decided that the less than 5$ a month cost of Mozy is worth our piece of mind.

Here is what Mozy has to say about what they offer…

• Mozy is simple to set up.
• It performs backups automatically in the background while you continue working.
• It handles versioning, storing yesterday’s renditions as well as today’s renditions of your files with each backup, allowing you to pull data from different backup dates.
• It encrypts all your files before transferring them to storage.
• It’s fast because it backs up only the data that has changed.
• It backs up both open and locked files.
• It’s inexpensive and reliable.

I totally agree with all of that, but I will say one negative thing about it…

THE FIRST UPLOAD TAKES FREAKING FOREVER!!!!

They say that you can do 2 GB per day unless you have a really fast connection and then you can do 9 GB.  I thought we had a really fast connection.  (At least that is what Comcast promised us).

When I have been asked about our back-up plan for our thousands and thousands of photos.  I tell them we went with Mozy.  The response is always the same, “Aren’t you worried about them going away or all of a sudden they are just gone?”  I don’t actually worry about that.  Mozy (a local company) was bought by EMC (a fortune 500 company).  I am confident that should something happen they will be notifying us prior to everything being wiped away from their system.  Also, we aren’t being irresponsible and deleting them from the original storage system.  So, if they do go away, the only real problem is if they go away the same day my file server gets fried.  Let’s just hope I have better luck than that.

You can go and give Mozy a try for FREE.  They offer 2 GB for free and then if you are happy, you can upgrade.  You’ll just need to download the program, pick what you want backed up and let it go.  Remember the first time around is SUPER slow.  Patience is a virtue – right?

*** PS – My husband just let me know that we are getting 9gb per day but when you are backing up 450 gb it is going to take a REALLY REALLY LONG TIME.