Yesterday, Mozy announced triple-digit growth over the last year in new MozyPro customers in the accounting and financial sectors. MozyPro gives these firms a secure way to protect their precious data, which was susceptible to hard drive crashes, virus and accidental deletion before being backed up with Mozy.
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Archive for July, 2009
More Accounting and Financial Companies Choose Mozy
Friday, July 31st, 2009(More Than) 10 Things to Look For in an Offsite Backup Provider
Thursday, July 30th, 2009Great post over at TechRepublic on 10 things to look for in an offsite backup provider. Their list is:
- Reliable software
- Storage plans that meet your needs
- Stellar reporting tools
- An approachable backup application
- Simple recovery
- Secure file transfer
- 24/7 support
- Free trials
- Version tracking
- E-mail alerts
Commenter JohnCameron3, an IT Consultant from Idaho, adds recovery time to the list:
Another thing to keep in mind is the time it takes to get all of your data back. It could take many hours to restore all of your files. Are you willing to be without your data for that long, especially in a business environment?
Downloading a couple of GBs of data won’t take too long, but what if you have 100′s of GB of data? Your backup provider should offer data delivery via USB drive or DVD (Backblaze and Mozy both offer this service).
Another common request in a backup provider is support for multiple platforms. If you’re an IT worker in charge of backups, I can see where this is a valid concern. However, for most home users, they’re only concerned with backing up whatever type of system they’re using (Mac or Windows).
Some of these items can be easily added to any provider’s service (such as E-mail alerts) while others require quite a bit of overhead and work (ex: 24/7 support).
So what are you looking for in an online backup provider?
How to Backup USB Drives with Mozy
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009One of the questions we see time and again is whether or not Mozy can backup USB (external) drives. Well, since we have a Mozy account, and we have an external drive, we thought we’d give it a shot.
Update: Be sure to read this post in the Mozy Support section, Does MozyHome support external drives?
First, open “My Computer” (or, on Vista, simply “Computer”).
Next, find your external drive, right-click, and choose “Add to MozyHome Backups”
Well, that was easy. How can you test if it worked? Simple: open your drive and look for Mozy’s icon overlays. If you see a red exclamation point over the icons, it’s in the backup set, but not yet backed up. If you don’t see anything, hit F5 to refresh the view.
One thing we’ve heard, however, is that an external drive that isn’t present when the backup starts will be dropped from the backup set. So we tested this theory.
We unplugged the external drive, then manually started the backup process. Once the backup was done, I plugged the USB drive back in, and checked for the icon overlays again. To my surprise, they were there! Hrm… maybe just a display bug. So I checked my MozyHome configuration, and the “G” drive was listed, and checked to be backed up!
Since my “G” drive is my local backup (using Acronis), I unchecked it, as a backup of my backup is a bit much, especially when it’s 140GB in size!
SugarSync Mobile for Android
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009SugarSync tweeted today about the release of their application for Android mobile phones.
This adds to their applications for the iPhone and Blackberry mobile devices (of course, along with their Mac and Windows clients). A Windows Mobile application is currently in Beta.
Backup Solution for Dummies
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009cnet recently wrote a piece on HP’s SimpleSave, calling it a backup solution for dummies.
One commenter on the article states:
I am pretty sure this is meant for your average computer user who has no (sic) mozy exists.
While the HP SimpleSave may be a backup solution for dummies, I believe this comment implies you have to be techno-savvy in order to use Mozy. This is completely false.
Mozy is incredibly easy to use. After signing up and downloading the software, you walk through the configuration wizard and Mozy takes it from there. In fact, from signup to backup, it only takes about 10 minutes.
So while HP claims to have the backup solution for dummies, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to use Mozy.
Love My Shoes Data Loss
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
Another day, another online merchant suffers a data loss. Love My Shoes‘s web server had corrupt data, which then trickled down through the raid disks and made it all the way to the backup set before it was realized.
Last week we suffered a serious failure to our web server. Upon investigation, corruption at the file system level propagated to all the redundant raid disks in the server. This corruption was later backed up to tape. Unfortunately didn’t catch this corruption until it had overwritten a week’s worth of backups, by which time the operating system was so corrupted the machine failed to load completely.
The damage was limited, unfortunately and fortunately, to our product imagery only. We have been working diligently these last couple of days to restore whatever images we could not recover from our fall back data. It has been a lengthy and manually intensive process. All primary photography has been restored. We are now working on restoring the alternate color photography.
We’ve been saying time and again that having a backup plan isn’t enough, if you can’t restore the right data when you need it. Love My Shoes goes on to say, We have implemented a more staggered approach to our backups to avoid a repeat of the above scenario.
Luckily Love My Shoes has been able to piece back together the corrupt data, and their site is now back up & fully operational.
Newest Syncing Feature: LAN Sync
Friday, July 17th, 2009Online backups used to be a dull industry with little to no innovation. Files were selected from the desktop or laptop, and uploaded to a remote server. But then companies such as SugarSync and SpiderOak came along and started innovating… adding version history, file sharing, and synchronization between multiple computers.
The latest news comes from DropBox. They’ve used their heads, and figured if two computers, which are sync’d, are on the same local network (such as both in the same office or some household), there’s no need to send the data to the cloud, then back to the other computer. When syncing with LAN Sync, the file will copy directly from one PC to the other.
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Previously the file was sent to the cloud & back down |
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With LAN Sync, the file is transferred directly from computer to computer |
Not only will this decrease syncing times (as the file goes direct, skipping a party in-between), but it will also save on bandwidth, as the file never goes into the cloud.
Mozy vs. Carbonite on theAppleBlog
Friday, July 17th, 2009
I just read a post on Mozy vs. Carbonite by Dave Greenbaum posted on TheAppleBlog, and I’ve got some big disagreements with what Mr. Greenbaum says.
Round One: Staying Power
Greenbaum makes some good points here, but doesn’t even mention that Mozy is owned by EMC? With a 27.66 billion-dollar market cap, EMC has the finances to keep Mozy alive. Plus, Greenbaum glazes over iJustine as simply the “Mozy gal”
Round Two: Setup and Installation
Greenbaum starts with, Carbonite cleans Mozy’s clock in software design
, but then the next sentence says Carbonite is Intel only.
Well then, doesn’t sound like Carbonite is a clear winner there.
Further, the article states,
Neither program will back up external media. Mozy claims it does, but if you detach it, it forgets the configuration. Carbonite flat-out refuses to back up externals.
So Mozy DOES backup external media, and Carbonite doesn’t at all. Again, doesn’t sound like Carbonite is cleaning Mozy’s clock.
Round Three: Restoration
Greenbaum says nobody wins here, but the restore actually WORKED with Mozy, whereas Carbonite failed via the web, and backups froze when they did a restore using the client software. And sure, Mozy’s DVD option isn’t cheap, but at least they offer it as an option.
Round Four: Support
I agree with Greenbaum’s statement, Neither company wins this round and both deserve an upper cut for lousy tech support.
Sorry… you get what you pay for.
Round Five: Security
Maybe Carbonite beats Mozy here, in their imaginary scenario. But if your email account is compromised, you have bigger problems. Not to mention you can create your own private key, and the encrypted data can’t be accessed by anyone without the key. In addition, with everyone on Facebook & sharing their lives on Twitter, answering Carbonite’s “security questions” isn’t a challenge.
Round Six: Cost
Carbonite is less expensive, but Mozy does offer the free version. We’ll score this round a draw.
Again, I have to disagree. If you purchase a 2-year agreement, Carbonite is $3.20 cheaper (after using 20% off discount codes on both Mozy and Carbonite). But since Mozy offers a monthly agreement, I would say it’s more affordable, as not everyone can drop $80 today, but most people can afford $4.95 / month.
With a 4-1/2 star rating, it’s obvious we prefer Mozy.
SpiderOak vs. Carbonite
Thursday, July 16th, 2009SpiderOak is at it again, this time targeting rival Carbonite in their latest press release.
The latest attack from SpiderOak cites supporting more devices & operating systems, version-history, and their synchronization and file sharing as the reasons their service tops Carbonite.
Add to that SpiderOak’s free 2GB account, and you can see a strong argument for switching to SpiderOak.
All of the other online backup companies better watch out… SpiderOak is on the attack.
SugarSync Collaboration E-mails
Friday, July 10th, 2009SugarSync recently announced a new feature for shared folders: daily emails.
This is a great feature to keep tabs on what’s being done on a project, and by whom. Sometimes some work will be done, and you won’t be notified… well now you will. Or sometimes someone will deny working on a file, but now you have proof.
You can edit these email notification settings on both the account page and the shared options page.
