Cameron’s recent data loss is an example of why online back up will become an integral part of home computing in the years to come. As our memories are increasingly stored in digital format (I know in the 9 months of my son’s life there has not been one film based photograph of him taken) people will be looking for a secure off site means of ensuring no harm comes to their pictures or files. Often though, like Cam, it won’t be until after a disaster has hit
I’m currently using Mozy; a free, automatic, secure back online back up system from Berkeley Data Systems. It’s simplicity itself – you download the application, tick the boxes on the predefined back up sets (such as ‘Word Documents’, ‘Music’, ‘Mo vies’,’Photographs’,’Financial Records’ etc), Mozy tracks down all your files and away it goes. You can define your own back sets if you wish and even drill down to the file level to add or remove files for a particular set.
Mozy claims to use differential backup, so it should only back up the bits of your Outlook file that have changed, but I haven’t found that to be the case in my instance. The Mozy icon lives in your system tray and behaves itself very well by only backing up when your system is idle. My only problem with this has been it back ups when I have an unattended torrent going so it can impact on your bandwidth.
You get 2G of backup for free, which covers most of my documents save for my music and video collections. There is a premium service, currently offering up to 20G for USD$39.95. If you want to try it and use my referral link https://mozy.com/ref/UTVC5L we both get an extra 256MB of back up space.
Here’s another review, from PC mag.
Dude, I’ve taken 12K hi-rez (2.5 – 3Mb) photos. I’m gonna have to back up to a substantially larger capacity that 20Gb – just for the images.
Current plan is to have a server in the garage.
Most house fires (90% – check the Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board) don’t progress beyond the room of origin, and there are about 1000 house fires a year in Melbourne. Say a million dewellings, and you get a 0.1% chance of losing your data to house fire. That drops to a 0.01% chance if you have backups in another room.
Another big danger is burglary – but who’s going to steal the micro-server you have in the garage? They’d have to find it first, and steal your primary data set too.
Josh, if all you want is data storage, have you considered one of these? If you’ve got a wireless network, all you’d need is a wireless access point and the drive in your garage and you’ve got sweet cable-free (except for power) storage.
Ooooh, nice. 200Gb for ~USD200, 100Mb Ethernet. I think that’s the way to go. I suspect after the warrenty expires I can crack it open and put a much larger disk in there.
just signed up and used you referal code(hope you enjoy the extra space). If any one else joins up please use my referal link https://mozy.com/?ref=4FNQA3 thanks i need the space !
Thanks Graham