Mozy

[Hummie]

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Mozy Review


What a great time I had yesterday. We traveled to St. Louis for my cousin's wedding. We had a mishap in the morning. Two hours before we were to leave I had gotten the gift out and set it on top of a hamper so that I could dig out wrapping paper. Thirty seconds later, the lid to the empty hamper fell through and down went the gift into the basket. One third of the gift broke. Hubby rushed out to the store to find anything similar to add to the set. What a stress that was. It always seems as if things like this happen to me---life just comes at me!

The wedding was beautiful and unique as it was a Catholic/Jewish wedding. One of the ring bearers had a lot of coaching to get down the isle and the other ran as fast as he could--his little feet moving were so adorable. At the reception I participated in a Jewish wedding dance where they lifted them up in chairs. It was a lot of fun.

We got back home about 1 a.m. and today I'm resting up before work tomorrow.
Yesterday I decided to try out Mozy. Mozy is an online backup for only $4.95 a month for unlimited amount of files. I continue to read great things about it from other scrappers, but I am so far not convinced.

What appeals to me about Mozy is that my files can be backed up daily off location. If my house would burn down, my files would be safe. Now, I could regularly give DVD's of my files to relatives, but how often would I really do that? This can have a scheduled backup every night to just backup new or changed files.

During set up, Mozy told me it would take over two months to complete the intial back-up? What? I only subscribed for one month.

At first, Mozy froze my entire computer as it generated and generated. I could not even click on the configure button to bring up the box to change settings, so I had to cancel the backup up to get to the configure box. I eventually got it running and hubby put a note on the screen so the boys wouldn't mess with it while we were gone to St. Louis.

When I returned home, I found this screen. 4.2% of my files were backed up. You can see it is backing up 198.9 GB of stuff. Yes, I have lots of stuff.

We went to bed and when I awoke, it was still on 4.2% and still on the same file transferring. Something seems wrong.

You can change the slider to use less of system resourses so that you can work on your computer while it backs up in the background. My settings was all the way to the right when it first crippled my machine and I had to cancel the backup.


On this page I have two choices, a scheduled backup or to have it work while computer is not in use. I would have thought it would have backed up tremendously overnight while not in use, but that does not seem to be my case. I am wondering what settings I have wrong and continue to play with it.






There are plenty of options under the option tab, including limiting the throttle during certain hours, which I believe has to do with how much internet access it takes. The boys were complaining that their x-box games were giving them red lights and they could not play, so I wonder if this feature would help that.






This screen shot shows the various file types Mozy automatically found to back up. What is cool is that it will even backup your Outlook e-mails.












This screen is for restoring, although I have no files there to restore yet and I am wondering how long it would take to restore everything if it takes this long to upload it.

So far, the backup does not seem to be moving along quickly and seems to be zapping all internet sharing between other computers. I am wondering if I have settings on my computer that put my computer to sleep rather than on idle and if that is why it did not back up over night.

I will continue to evaluate it, but for my first experience, it has been frustrating. Even after clicking on the configure button to bring up the settings, it generates files for a very long time before the box will even come up so that I can play with the settings.

In addition, I've always not even taken a second look at online backup because it just seems scary knowing that my private stuff is on another computer somewhere. However, with all the postive talk about Mozy, I just had to take it for a test run. I will give you an update later!

[Digi-Scrap Princess]

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Hummie, I've been using Mozy now for about 6 mos. (since I had a h.d. crash last summer). I love it & can't imagine being without it. When I started my initial backup it said it would take a couple of months. That's when I discovered that you can configure smaller backups.

What I did was select my most important files (start with perhaps 2 - 4 GB). First I backed up kits I purchased at one site. That took about 3 days & after that I began adding one or two folders each time. My digi-scrap kits are organized first by site, then by designer, so each time I changed the configuration I would add a different site's folder.

Last month I accidentally deleted 65 GB of data from my EDH. Unfortunately I had NOT backed it up to Mozy. I'll never make that mistake again. For $9.95 you can back up 2 PCs to Mozy. While we're testing DSL vs Broadband (I rec'd. a special deal from 2 companies), I have broadband backing up one EDH, while DSL backs up the other EDH.

Life is good... as long as you have a backup plan. ;)

[Hummie]

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That's what I finally went back and did and just choose all my photos....26 gigs. It's been running now for a week and it's only 22% done.

I'm just not sure this is the best thing.

I did read someone complain that if it took this long to upload, how long would it be to restore. I see they have an option for them sending you a cd in the mail.

[Digi-Scrap Princess]

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That's what I finally went back and did and just choose all my photos....26 gigs. It's been running now for a week and it's only 22% done.

I'm just not sure this is the best thing.

I did read someone complain that if it took this long to upload, how long would it be to restore. I see they have an option for them sending you a cd in the mail.

I've restored several times Hummie. The easiest way is to follow their instructions on setting up the Mozy restore icon so it appears in your list of hard drives. That way you can click it (as if you're clicking one of your hard drives), then select the file(s) you want to restore.

Once I had a problem with the configuration & had to reinstall Mozy program. In my experience with them, tech support turn around has been prompt. Although backing up online is slow unless you have lots of RAM, at lest I feel more secure than with just a couple of EHDs & DVD bkups.

Initially I was hesitant to use online backup, but after reading several reviews on Mozy I decided to try it out. There's another one that had high ratings, but I don't remember the name.

[Halsgirl]

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Personally, I'd never back up to an outside source like that. I do back my genealogy up on an EHD [and send disks to certain family members -- Mom's not far], but I just don't trust outside services [and I won't pay that kind of money for something that is going to take 2 months to back up!!]

I also have a special tote in my closet that has all photos and important stuff in it. In case of fire... grab external HD... tote... laptop and RUN! I also have an wonderful shed that is over 100' from the house... It's built like a house and is great for keeping copies of burned DVD's full of data. The thing that worries me most is genealogical photos. I've thought of a safety deposit box for them.... or a burn-proof file cabinet [big bucks there!]

[Wags]

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I use Carbonite - took about 4 weeks to back up over 50GB. Most of the length of time required for intial back-up is because 99% of ISP's limit how much you can upload per day. Mine limits me to 2GB. But it now runs so quietly in the background I never notice it.

Unless you are awake and realize that the house is on fire right away the odds of being able to grab anything and get out in time are slim.

DVD's get corrupted and EHD's have a higher failure rate than Internal Drives due to cooling issues. But I still back stuff up to them too.

[lovinlifegurl]

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I am not patient enough. Mozy was gonna cost too much to back up everything. Carobnite was gonna take a month. Blaze said it wouldn't but then again, it wouldn't back up everything i wanted either, soooo. nope.

[204cg]

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Currently I do not back up with an online service. I never heard of Mozy, Carobnite yes. Thanks for making me aware of such services. I do have several external drive that back up per schedule.