One of the … side effects … of working for a giant corporation is that I get a lot press releases in my inbox every month. I’m still new to the EMC world, so a lot of these press releases are, basically, inscrutable. This or that company purchased these or those EMC products, blah blah blah. I’m not complaining. I actually take this as an incentive to learn more about EMC as time goes by so that I better understand the big picture of what EMC is all about (hint: it’s about Information).
Some times, those press releases are quite easy to understand and one of them was about Mozy. Mozy is an on-line backup tool. You install a lightweight client on your workstation (laptop in my case), you tell it what you want to back up and when and then it does it by sending your data to some server(s) on the cloud. It does it in the background.
My initial backup ran in just under 4 hours and according to Mozy is 550MB or so of data. I only backed up "My Documents" (hence, the relatively small amount of data).
It ran again (I think 24 hours later), backed up some more stuff in about 8 minutes. I never noticed it happen. There was no obvious impact on any work I was doing at the time.
I did a test restore and it provides a decent enough user interface to select the file(s) you want to restore. It was quick, snappy, informative … I don’t know how it could be any better.
I spoke to one of my colleagues about it who has more experience with online backup. He said that Mozy is good but that it lacks an ability to tell Mozy to do the equivalent of "restore files that I deleted." This is to say that if you don’t know you deleted a fie, or if you do but don’t remember its name, Mozy may not help you much in terms of easily finding it to restore.
They impose a 2GB limit if you just want to use the service for free. It looks like it’s $5/month for unlimited storage.
Bottom line, if someone asks me if they should use Mozy for online backup, my answer right now is, "Hell, yes."
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