Mozy Remote Backup

Mozy Remote Backup – I first saw this ad on Ars Technica and decided to give it a test run.

First of all, let me try to explain to you what Mozy is (not sure if that’s pronounced like Moz-zy or Moe-zy). It’s a online backup service. What piqued my interest initially was they were giving accounts with 2GB of free space and so I did some more research. Indeed it is completely free, to let you get a taste of the service I guess. 2GB is plenty if all you’re going to do is backup documents and stuff.

After signing up, you download their software which installs a service and you can now configure what to backup. By default, it’ll select all your personal locations (i.e. My Documents and Desktop) and upload documents, photos, music, video, financial data, etc. I was shocked it even found my Quicken data files.

Next thing is privacy. By default, you can use Mozy’s 448bit encryption key to encrypt your data, but you can also provide your own key if you don’t trust them.

Finally, it’s setting when you want the back ups to occur. You can either set a time to run daily/weekly, or tell it to run when your computer is idling.

Here’s some reviews of the service:
PC Magazine
TechCrunch
enginerd

Since my home computer recently died and no one’s technical enough to fix it, my dad needed a new place for his backups. I decided to sign my dad up for this service at which point I noticed it asked for a referral id. I decided to input my own and it turns out it gives both people an additional 256MB to their account (4 referrals for 1 true GB), which I thought was pretty nice.

If you’re planning to sign up for this service, feel free to sign up under me to give me more space:
https://mozy.com/?code=9A22KF
Referral ID: 9A22KF

One thing to note is that files that aren’t in the current backup set will be deleted in 30 days. So in other words, if you don’t run your backup in 30 days, it’ll be automatically deleted.

One thing I did find extremely annoying (probably won’t affect 99% of you out there) is the fact that the client has to be ran as an administrator. Since my default account is a non-admin, when I ran the client software as an administrator, it detected the wrong personal folders (it found the admin’s personal folders instead of mine). If I ran it as myself, I get a MozyClientError6:

Mozy Client Error

Code: MozyClientError6

Problem:
You haven’t configured your backup client, so there is nothing to back up.

Solution:
Right click on the Mozy in your tray icon and select ‘Configure’ and select some files for Mozy to back up. Visit http://mozy.com/support/manual for the instruction manual on how to set your Mozy up.

which probably meant the configuration/settings I made weren’t able to be saved, which probably means the settings are somewhere in Program Files or somewhere I don’t have write access to. I guess if I wanted to, I can set it up on my admin account once and the settings will then be preserved.

I also forgot to note, that you can only install the client on 2 machines, but if you really wanted more, you’d probably just create additional accounts.