Like most folks I’ve talked to, my digital media backup situation is less than ideal. I’ve got pictures, video, and music scattered all over the place — across operating systems, CD, DVD, internal hard drives, external hard drives, etc. (At least I got the Zip disks out of the mix a couple years ago.)
Most recently (last year) I tried to consolidate everything onto one Windows computer and a Maxtor One Touch II external hard drive (after giving up on a Buffalo LinkStation NAS), but never finished… And would my strategy matter anyway if this building is destroyed? I’ve contemplated swapping external hard drives between my apartment and either someone else’s place or perhaps a safe deposit box but I’m too lazy. Thomas Hawk actually does it: Archiving his photos on three 750GB external hard drives that are periodically rotated down from the Bay Area to his parent’s home in LA.
My buddy Tim has been talking up online storage service Mozy for some time now. I never bothered giving it a spin, assuming they would go out of business and take my data with them (or worse…). But now that General Electric has contracted Mozy (for many millions of dollars) to backup employee data worldwide, I have more confidence that they’ll be around and hopefully secure. And just last week, Mozy released a beta Mac client… Since that’s where I spend most of my computing time these days, I gave it a shot.
In my first test run, I used the free version of Mozy (2GB max storage) to archive 1.5GB of a small subset of pics that I’ve managed to import into iPhoto. It took about 24 hours. Hopefully, differential backups are more efficient. Even so, I can’t imagine uploading my small 20GB music collection. (Unlimited online storage is $5/mo.) Though the idea of online storage is efficient and reassuring, given bandwidth speeds compared to data sizes, I’m just not sure this will be the right solution for me.
Who’s got a better method?
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I just load Mozy up a few days ago on my MacBook, and your right, the initial backup takes a while. I am currently working through 30GB between two computers and it has been 5 days. I am thinking it will be a few more before my complete backup is finished. Incrementals on my laptop which is finished seem to happen very quickly and very seamlessly and my restore testing went well.
Also worth mentioning, unlimited storage is $4.95 per month per computer you have on your account.
So far though, I am impressed. I am moving away from a USB Hard Drive backup solution in order to solve the issue of having an off-site backup.
I make sure my parent's PC has a large hard drive and use a synchronization program like FolderShare to keep a copy of my data there.
Given that you have too much data to backup to an online service, hard drive swapping is the easiest way. Consolidate your data into one location on your network, or at least one location for music, another for photos, etc. Get two external drives and connect one to your computer. Schedule backups to the external drive. Every time you go to the other location (every week, every month, whatever) swap out the drives. Make sure the second drive is configured the same way as the first so your scheduled backups continue to run. Once you get past the initial setup, it's mostly a maintenance free operation.