we both get 256mb bonus if you use me as a referral for all your wonderful secure online backup needs.

https://mozy.com/?ref=YU8WWF

holler.

3/2/2009 1:24:52 PM

what the hell am i going to do with 32MB of extra space??

actually, technically, I guess it would be .256 bits

[Edited on March 2, 2009 at 1:45 PM. Reason : s]

3/2/2009 1:43:26 PM

Mozy FTW. I'll say it again, it's FTW.

I do the unlimited backup for $5/mo, so the extra 256MB won't help me any.

3/2/2009 1:58:50 PM

can it be used with time machine?

3/2/2009 2:04:03 PM

I don't think so. But there is a Mozy client for the Mac

3/2/2009 2:05:30 PM

ok, I don't need it then

[Edited on March 2, 2009 at 2:14 PM. Reason : s]

3/2/2009 2:13:35 PM

what exactly do you mean "works with Time Machine"?
I use Mozy as a supplement to Time Machine - i have an external networked drive for my Time Machine Backup for my whole drive, then I have Mozy that backs up only certain folders to mozy.com

3/2/2009 2:19:29 PM

Quote :

"i have an external networked drive for my Time Machine Backup for my whole drive"

How do you do this? Is the drive connected directly to a network or through a PC?

I'd love to use Time Machine but I hate lugging around a portable HDD

3/2/2009 2:22:15 PM

why would you have to lug it around?

3/2/2009 2:34:09 PM

If it were wireless and through the network, it's out of sight, out of mind. If I have an external HDD it would need to stay connected to the computer most of the time. And I'm pretty mobile with my laptop.

Doesn't TM backup every hour? I wouldn't have to do that, but it would be nice to have a solution to take advantage of it's full functionality.

3/2/2009 3:02:16 PM

you can adjust the settings to whatever fits your schedule.

But you're right, it would be a pain to have to constantly remember to re-attach a HDD every time you got back to your desk

3/2/2009 3:06:32 PM

^ isn't it great that we can be that lazy if we want?

i just like the idea that the whole system is completely automated, regardless of where I am in my home, and that I don't even have to think about it.

3/2/2009 3:35:04 PM

Quote :

"i just like the idea that the whole system is completely automated, regardless of where I am in my home, and that I don't even have to think about it."

yeah, that's exactly what I have in my house - we have 2 laptops that wireless backup automatically to a Time Machine drive that is networked behind our Mac Mini entertainment computer. Set it once last year, and haven't messed with it since.

It's really easy, actually. just plug an external drive into either:
1) Any Mac running 10.5. Then use the Sharing preference pane to share the drive on the network. Then on your laptop, connect to the other Mac and mount the drive. Then go to Time Machine preferences and pick the networked drive. And that's it. Your laptop will automatically mount/unmount the network drive whenever it needs to do a backup, assuming the other Mac is turned on. If the other Mac is turned off, or you are away from your house, or there is network problems or whatever, then Time Machine will just skip the backup. The TM icon in the menu bar will show a little exclamation mark to let you know there was an error on the last backup, but it won't come out and bother you with an error message. You can just ignore the error, and whenever you get back home, TM will mount the drive in the background and do another incremental backup.

2) If you have an Apple Airport Extreme router (or a Time Capsule, obviously) you can put a USB drive onto the router and share it, and select that drive as your TM backup. It basically works the same as above - whenever you are on your home network, it will backup normally.


If you decide to do a network Time Machine, here is a "pro tip". You can do the initial backup using a normal external drive connected via USB, which will be much faster than doing a huge backup using your network. Then, you can move the external drive with the initial backup to a network drive, then change the TM Preferences to look at the network drive. TM will recognize that it is already using a TM backup, and it won't do the whole initial backup again, it will just pick right up with incremental backups.

However, there is one caveat you need to account for. If you use a normal external drive as your TM backup, you will notice that TM just copies files and folders directly onto the external drive. If you use a network drive, though, it will create a "sparse bundle" file on the network drive, which is a single xxx.sparsebundle file that stores all of the backup data. So, what you need to do is put an empty drive on the network and tell TM to use that drive. Then start your first backup. But after the initial backup starts and the .sparsebundle file is created on the networked drive, stop the backup. Then connect the network drive directly to your Mac with USB. Then reconfigure TM to use the local external drive, and kick off the backup again. TM will go ahead and use the existing .sparsebundle file to complete the initial backup. When the initial backup is done, move the drive back onto the network, reconfigure TM to use that drive, and start it up again.

3/2/2009 4:04:59 PM

^good tip. I've been looking at a Time Machine exclamation mark for about 3 months now and i'm getting nervous.. my TM drive is still in Australia.

But yeh, i do the same thing. TM for everything and Mozy for some little things. I'm just using the free 2 gigs now so 256mb is a little something

3/2/2009 4:22:12 PM

Dan, send me a gmail or something. I've been meaning to hop on mozy for awhile.

3/2/2009 4:45:04 PM

use the link in my initial post or use the referral code "YU8WWF"

Thanks!

[Edited on March 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM. Reason : fdff]

3/2/2009 6:09:46 PM

referred

3/2/2009 9:06:00 PM

Update:

So, thanks to the good mozy reviews in here, and the fact that I have been looking at it for a long time, I found a 10% off code and ponied up for 2 years of service (for like 90 dollars).

UNFORTUNATELY they do not support backups for network shares. This is especially unfortunate as it's my linux-running NAS that I want to backup (and that's literally the ONLY thing I want to back up). Turns out they used to support this, in beta more or less, but disabled the option. They (being dumb) left the option in the windows registry, and I turned it on -- afterwards reading that the program would automatically turn this back off eventually. Since the program runs as SYSTEM as a service, I gave SYSTEM read-only permission to the mozy options, revoked everything else and left myself with full control of those entries. I hope this works, but I'm probably still going to send an angry e-mail.

I understand why they wouldn't support this; they don't want somebody paying for one computer and using it to back up who knows how many via network shares. However, I still don't see why they can't do something like ADVERTISE this limitation somewhere more prominently or enable something like backup of a single network share.

[Edited on March 2, 2009 at 9:59 PM. Reason : .]

3/2/2009 9:59:05 PM

gg on the workaround

3/2/2009 10:04:34 PM

thanks,

the option is HKLM\software\mozy\options:networksharesupport if anybody wants to know

set it to "1", and revoke system write permissions to options.

3/2/2009 10:15:02 PM

Quote :

"I understand why they wouldn't support this; they don't want somebody paying for one computer and using it to back up who knows how many via network shares. However, I still don't see why they can't do something like ADVERTISE this limitation somewhere more prominently or enable something like backup of a single network share."

http://mozy.com/landing/pro_comparison

3/2/2009 10:33:35 PM

Quote :

"gg on the workaround"

agreed, nothing wrong with a bit of hacking

3/2/2009 10:35:16 PM

^^admittedly I didn't see that, mostly because the pro version isn't suited to my needs. at all. I mean

Quote :

"Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month"

[Edited on March 2, 2009 at 10:49 PM. Reason : $178.95/mo for my 350 GB of PERSONAL FILES? Fuck that, and fuck you for suggesting it. ]

3/2/2009 10:37:41 PM

well, Mozy decided to make a product delineation so they could, you know..... make money. But, it sounds like the pro version is suited to your needs, if your needs include backing up network drives and a huge amount of data.

And while they do advertise "unlimited storage" for the normal mozy client for $5/mo or whatever, don't try to act dumb and say they intend on normal people using 350GB. btw, what kind of super ISP you have that will allow you to upload 350GB in anything less than a couple months anyway?

3/2/2009 10:49:10 PM

just look at the plethora of features that pro has. useful to a business, but not to me. I need to back up my ONE drive, which is where everything on my personal computer except program installs, etc, goes. I'm not acting dumb, I'm saying that it is reasonable to expect support for my circumstance with the home account. And how big is a hard drive in the generic shitty dells you can buy nowadays? >= 350 GB? probably.

I don't have a super ISP, I have shitty regular time-warner. Don't care if it takes a few weeks to get up there, I just want it backed up.

3/2/2009 10:54:07 PM

I have over 275GB backed up on Mozy. It took several weeks to get that initial backup done.

They've never given me any beef over having that much, and I'm sure there's lots of people with tons more than I have. Plus, storage to them is cheap. You can get a TB for what, $90 now?

3/2/2009 10:57:13 PM

^^ ok, whatever - i don't really care.

but anyways, assuming you can get a full 512kbps for upload, it would take 63 days for a full backup of 350GB. which would, of course, cripple your internet use that entire time.
I just tested my upload speed right now and could only get 380kbps up, which would take almost 90 days

[Edited on March 2, 2009 at 11:02 PM. Reason : .]

3/2/2009 11:01:35 PM

and, like I said, that's fine.

Mozy supports bandwidth caps, and I don't play games or share files or etc.

edit: What would be funny, however, is if this backup is what kills my NAS hd

[Edited on March 2, 2009 at 11:11 PM. Reason : .]

3/2/2009 11:05:59 PM

Quote :

"You can get a TB for what, $90 now?"

I don't believe that is the cost of redundant storage. Hopefully, they're not just going out to tiger direct and buying some cheap drives off the loading dock and tossing them into a motherboard.

(although, it could happen: http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/magnolia-suffer.html)

They'd need the proper equipment to host the drives, and at least more than one physical byte for every logical byte.

[Edited on March 3, 2009 at 12:00 AM. Reason : s]

3/2/2009 11:59:07 PM

power, floor space, servers, redundant drives, spare parts, labor, et al

3/3/2009 12:01:18 AM

I bet the data is compressed..... or, for their sake, I hope it is.
Come to think of it, the Mozy Client encrypts your data before uploading it, and conceivably it could compress it too. This could help greatly with the upload time and the actual physical storage requirements (and they would still charge you based on the size of the uncompressed data on your own drive, of course)

Probably won't help much, though, if you have 100GB of movies, music and pictures.

3/3/2009 12:03:56 AM

depending on how strictly you define encryption, compression would double as encryption.

3/3/2009 12:09:33 AM

more like depending on how you define compression

since it's predictable afaik unless you make up your own crazy ass backwards compression algorithm

3/3/2009 12:14:54 AM

they use 256 bit blowfish encryption I believe. I don't know much about how that algorithm works, but i suppose it could have built in compression, or it could be compressed then encrypted

3/3/2009 12:21:25 AM

it's more than that, 400something.

but you also get the option to use your own 256 bit AES

3/3/2009 12:22:46 AM

Quote :

"since it's predictable..."

unpredictability doesn't determine whether or not something counts as encryption, IMO. 32 bit encryption is still encryption, even though we can spend about 20 minutes figuring out how to predict what it did and reverse engineer that, AKA crack the encryption.

3/3/2009 7:32:24 AM

Quote :

"I don't believe that is the cost of redundant storage. Hopefully, they're not just going out to tiger direct and buying some cheap drives off the loading dock and tossing them into a motherboard."

You're right, although I was basically saying that storage has become ultra cheap lately. But I would think that storage would be one of the cheaper aspects of running a service like this. I pay them $60/yr, every year to store around 275GB of data that I could store myself for several years for less than $100.

Plus, I remember reading that Mozy plans on making most of their money with Mozy Pro. GE bought a MozyPro license for all 300,000+ of their employees. (link)

3/3/2009 7:42:09 AM

I did go through and delete a bunch of iso files I had and didn't need, as well as a bunch of temp files, so now it only has to back up ~115 gigs.

3/4/2009 10:31:57 AM

6 gigs up





108 to go

3/4/2009 9:38:05 PM

I will note, my 'carbonite' online backup has 135 gig backed up on 1 account, and over 300 gig on another.

3/4/2009 10:51:58 PM

Quote :

"6 gigs up 108 to go "

lulz

3/4/2009 11:08:15 PM

wrt to this:

Quote :

"but anyways, assuming you can get a full 512kbps for upload, it would take 63 days for a full backup of 350GB. which would, of course, cripple your internet use that entire time. I just tested my upload speed right now and could only get 380kbps up, which would take almost 90 days"

The throttle in mozy itself is OK, if you have one computer on the network. I finally turned on QoS in dd-wrt on my router, restricting mozy to bulk priority. Right now mozy says it's uploading at ~450 kb/s, and I've verified that if I start a speed test, during the upload portion, mozy drops to 0 while I get ~500 kb/s upload in the test, which is pretty close to advertised. The only real drawback to this is that mozy uses port 443, so this will have an effect on all https traffic.

[Edited on March 7, 2009 at 2:54 PM. Reason : P.S. 15 gigs up!1]

3/7/2009 2:50:58 PM

Initial backup finally finished today! After deleting a bunch of .iso files I don't need/don't have keys to, got it down to 114.3 GB.

4/5/2009 7:24:27 PM

Im about to hop on the unlimited bandwagon. Anyone on DSL that has done this. Looking to upload about 300 gigs and not wanting AT&T to send me magic bills for lots of dollars.

5/8/2009 10:56:36 PM

230Gb, here we come

5/9/2009 1:33:16 PM

I would seriously recommend doing what I did to throttle Mozy with your router, especially if you have more than one computer on the internet.

5/10/2009 5:21:03 PM

Just one box mostly but I have my laptop set to leech from the neighbors.

I've been thinking about switching from DSL over to earthlink, so I have this idea to have both connections for a few weeks if I can use both of them in XP. Somehow, I don't think it would work.

Outside of that, any other ideas to get a fatter upload pipe to speed this along? I start summer classes at state, think it would be possible to get a connection via resnet (either wired or wireless) to get a fatter outgoing pipe?

5/10/2009 10:12:20 PM

When I did my initial backup I switched to roadrunner turbo, then when it was done I switched back to regular. Granted, it was a pretty pitiful upload speed increase, but I guess every little bit helps.

5/12/2009 7:55:17 AM

Any idea what the turbo upload bandwidth is? As best I can tell, in the Carolinas it is just 512kb (is upload really that much more expensive for the ISPs? For U-Verse http://tinyurl.com/59zujy it isn't even posted.

5/14/2009 10:00:31 AM

it's 512.

5/14/2009 10:21:17 AM