Technosailor.com

The other day I was asked to review Mozy.com, a online backup provider. The idea is pretty simple. Download a desktop app and set it up and it will automatically do backups of selected data of your choice.

Besides the privacy concerns of giving your data to a third party, it does provide an essential service for people with valuable data – it puts data somewhere else – not on your computer in case your hard drive fails.

I went to their website to get the client software and found that there were several versions – a free version witha 2 GB limit and several paid versions. I decided to go ahead with the free version to see how well it worked.

In one sense, I was happy. It tried to figure out what was data – images, videos, Word and Excel docs – and suggested what to backup. I didn’t look at this feature too well but I wonder what is the criteria for suggesting. It executed the first backup – a full backup – which was very long. Hours, in fact. Over the next couple nights it did incremental backups that went much quicker.

On the flip side, this app makes my computer crawl – even when its not doing anything. Several times I’ve had to fo Ctrl-Alt-Del > Task Manager > Kill Process on Mozy.

Not a wonderful side effect but overall a decent app to try backups with.

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Written by Aaron Brazell on July 12, 2006

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