Life at the Home20

In light of my recent posts regarding my Genealogical Scanning Project I decided to check into some online backup services.  According to the online reviews I went through tonight, Mozy appears to be the front runner hands down.  Unfortunately, I base this conclusion on price alone.  Everything else is too cost prohibitive for me to even consider.

Now I know that when I backup everything that I really want to on my desktop, it will reach well over 37 GB.  Mozy offers a free service for anything up to 2 GB.  Anything over that costs $4.95 per month and can be billed monthly if you like.  But it is unlimited and how could you possibly beat that?  Apparently no one can.

So in order to test the idea, I have signed up for the free 2 GB offer which does not require even a credit card to set up.  It does require you to download an application to your computer.  However, during setup I was a little disgruntled.  The application searches your hard drive and makes a recommendation for backup.  Naturally, I didn’t like the recommendation.  Besides I only wanted to use the 2 GB free space so I had to start whittling away at their recommendation.  I left Outlook checked but when I started unchecking the other folders things went a little wacky.  Check marks started appearing and disappearing at random.  Once I got that under control I was able to select what I wanted most to backup within My Documents.

Mozy gives you a graphic showing how much of your 2GB you have used up.  I went all the way to 84% for starters.  Mozy then works in the background of my system and may take up to 3 days to do the backup as it runs only when the computer has been idle for at least 30 minutes.  It may be a bit longer than 3 days for me as I always shut my computer down when I leave for work every day.  And there is a thunderstorm approaching as I type and I will most likely shut it down for the night so who knows how long it will take!  I’ll let you know.

Tags: Computers & Genealogy //