mozy on over

I've been struggling for a long time to routinely and successfully back up my home computer. I've got 9 gigs of MP3s and thousands of pictures, as well as videos and documents - the usual. I've tried backing up to DVDs & external hard drives, but that takes way too much time and requires me to be involved - not to mention that I have to lug the DVDs and hard drive to work in case my house burns down. I've tried manually copying the files to an FTP server on my web server, but I worry about encryption, and again I have to be involved. Inevitably I forget to back stuff up for a month and then my hard drive crashes (yes, it happened a couple months ago).

I've been looking for a solution that is web based, so when the house blows up I've still got my data. It also needs to be automatic. It needs to allow me to select exactly what I want to back up in what directories, and then when I change the contents of those directories, it backs up accordingly. Oh, and it needs to be cheap. I'm sure there's options out there, but until this weekend I hadn't seen any.

Enter Mozy.

I ran across this site the other day and I've now been testing their product for a few days. So far it meets all my criteria. You download a little app that runs in your system tray. You tell it what types of files in what directories to backup, and then it backs up those files to its servers using your broadband connection. I have it set so it backs up automatically in the background when my computer is idle for 20 minutes. Currently I'm telling it to backup a specific folder in My Pictures. Whenever I add more pictures in that folder, Mozy backs them up.

Mozy gives you 2 gigs of space for free - you just have to agree to fill out a survey and receive a weekly ad newsletter. This is a great way for me to test the product. I've had bad experiences with other online storage (cough cough, streamload, cough), so I wouldn't pay for their service unless I knew it was going to work.

If you need more space you can get up to 20 gigs for $39.95 a year - their most expensive plan. That's very reasonable.

I've had Mozy working on my 1.9 gigs of pictures for the last few days, and I've admittely run into several issues. First things first - Mozy is still in beta, so bugs are to be expected. I had several connection errors this weekend, and at one point I couldn't log in to my account because it said I didn't exist. However, to Mozy's credit the backup picked up right where it left off each time it encountered a problem. I'm not forced to start from the beginning.

Finally this morning I had a successful backup. Granted, it took a couple days to upload almost 2 gigs of data, but I'm using a tiny DSL connection. Once the initial upload is complete, it's just incremental from there.

I need to make sure that I can successfully restore the files, and Mozy needs to make sure they work the bugs out soon. I'd be willing to pay for their service if they can assure me a stable product.