The Small Green Tree Blog

If you’re interested in a simple, fit-and-forget, powerful, and FREE backup solution for your PC, we can recommend MOZY (When we say “free” - you get 2Gb of free storage, but if you need more storage the pricing is very reasonable).

We discovered MOZY following a bit of a scare we had with an office PC the other day. It was a Monday morning (when else?) and our normally totally reliable but aging Compaq refused to wake up. “Holy cow - what’s going on!”

Now we did have a backup plan for the PC in place. But it’s at a time like this that you discover how good or bad that plan is.

The trouble is - we have tried many types of backup software for our office PC’s down the years, and we’ve never really been happy with any of them. Backup is one of those problems that if you start to think about it it’s like turning over a stone.

• what do you back up? It seems practically impossible to backup up everything because of speed/storage constraints
• how many backups? Do you simple keep one total backup that you overwrite each time? If so, what if you have some corruption or loss from two weeks ago? If the backup is daily, unless you catch it before the next backup dump, the error will simply be written into your backup data! The solution to this problem is “incremental” or “differential” backup” - but then that makes the first issue of storage space even harder and requires intelligent backup software
• when do you backup?
• where do you keep the backups?
• how do you know the restore will work when push comes to shove?

I remember on one occasion we needed to restore a backup we had dutifully kept. We had used a built-in Microsoft Windows utility which we had wrongly assumed to be future proof. I forget the Windows versions involved - it may have been 3.1 & 95 - but when it came to restore we found the backup files (from the previous Windows version) were no longer recognized by the new Windows software. The backup disks ended up in the bin (fortunately the setback wasn’t too severe).

In the case of our deceased Compaq PC we found that sure enough some key files had been getting regularly backed up across the LAN on another PC. This was using Acronis Backup (that I can’t say we can recommend). We had set up the routine some months back. How good was it going to be now that we needed to use the backups in anger?

Well what we found was that we did not face a huge problem - the most important data was saved. But all the same it was clear that it was going to take a lot of time and patience to get back to the status quo. Very tedious.
And why was that? Why was the backup so limited? Well, we had found that although Acronis claimed to offer FTP backup to a web server, it never really worked properly. And even across the LAN it was so slow and resource-hungry we had found it only practical to backup the most critical data only. The result was that we felt obliged to take a calculated gamble with the medium-critical data!

Anyhoo, the ending was a happy one. We discovered that the heatsink on the Compaq processor had lifted clear, and as a result the machine was quite sensibly refusing to boot for safety reasons. Once the heatsink was fixed the lovely beast woke up and the data was safe (I say “fixed”, the technology involved a whisky tumbler of cold water sat on top of the processor - a solution only marginally improved since then by a paperweight fixed on top of the heatsink!).

But it was in the course of all this hassle that we stumbled across a link to MOZY - and very good it seems to be too.

MOZY is an Internet backup solution - so you don’t need to worry about disks or backup media. The key features are:

• simple to set up
• Performs backups automatically in the background
• Encrypts all files on your PC before transfer
• Performs incremental backups
• Backs up only blocks that have changed
• Backs up open/locked files

Our experience so far? I guess we’d say “it does exactly what it says on the tin“, and we are very pleased. It seems to be able to work in the background without a fuss. That’s probably because of the capability it has to lock/unlock files. However for this feature to work you may need to change your hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS if you haven’t done so already (in Windows XP that can be done by selecting Control panel >> Administrative Tools >> Computer Management >> Disk Management).

To get a free 2GB Mozy account click here