Devolfamily

There’s a lot of online backup companies out there that give you a good amount of space for free. So why Mozy? It’s the only one that I know of that has both a windows and an os x client. But it also has block level increment and bandwidth throttling which are important to me.

I hate to say it but, I have to back crap up at work and until recently had to oversee that process, so I’ve learned to really hate backing crap up. Kind of a weird response since I know the consequences of data loss. I’ve always been happy with my personal stuff on a raid1 disk set and calling it good. Why the change? Digital cameras.

Heather keeps reminding me that the last three years of family pictures no longer live in her photo albums but on the computer. Hmm. Good point. Although, are her photo albums backed up? Sadly I’ll probably end up spending the $4.95 a month for unlimited space.

Update: major limitation to the mozy service, it’ll only backup local files. Which is fine for my iphoto library on the mac. But it doesn’t include all of my pictures. I just started using iphoto recently. The rest live on my home server. Guess what, you have to use MozyPro to backup win2k3 server. Pricing for that service goes up very quickly.

I’d also started to look around at other things that would be fun to backup. If it’s unlimited why not backup all of my music and movies too, right? No net drive support. Damn that sucks.

So I did some more research.

IBackup would be the ideal solution, offers Exchange and MS SQL native backups, Mac support; all the bells and whistles. But it’s expensive. And I’m cheap when it comes to services.

But turns out Carbonite runs on windows 20003 eventhough it only mentions xp and vista on the website. Three downsides, two significant the other minor. 1st: no scheduling backups, the client determines when it wants to back stuff up. 2nd: the client had a significant perf hit on my work win2k3 box. It’s adding a little dot to folders and files in explorer to indicate backup status. Nice feature, but it’s causing all kinds of screen flashes on re-draws. Only happens when status changes, and on a server that I’m not looking at, I don’t care. 3rd: you have to have an account for each computer. Oh, and no mac client.

They’re both cheap enough that technically I could just use mozy for the mac and carbonite for my server. Or I can keep dumping stuff from the mac onto the server and just paying for carbonite. Just depends on how lazy I’m feeling I guess.

I was also intriqued by Diino too, since it seemingly offers anything you could possibly think of. But it’s awful expensive for just simple backup.