Wednesday, May 27, 2009

How to backup your computer online (Mac or Windows)

After looking around for a good way to backup my data outside of my house, I found Mozy.com, the price if reasonable and it's super easy to use on Mac or Windows. You get 2GB free of charge so you can give it a try without having to spend any money. I setup a free account for my wife computer, backing up all of her Microsoft office documents and few folders. If you like to give it a try click on this link: https://mozy.com/?ref=HW5U9L this will give my wife an extra 256MB to her account ;-) Mozy charge 4.95$/month for unlimited data, if you sing up make sure you don't push all of your data on the same month, well assuming you have more data to backup then your bandwidth cap from your internet provider, they pretty much all have one now. I'm with Comcast and my cap is 200GB per months... Regardless of the cap, it may take you few weeks or even months to upload all of this data to mozy... I have a pretty good upload speed of ~250kb/sec and Mozy is telling me it will take me around 5 to 10 days to upload 100GB









I also looked at Amazon s3, http://aws.amazon.com/s3/, very cool stuff, I use it for work, but you paid $0.15 per GB / month. 100GB would cost me 15$ per month plus I would have to paid for the Data Transfer $0.17 per GB transferred... so Mozy definitely beat this...

The last one I looked at was DropBox (http://www.getdropbox.com/pricing) This is more like a share folder that get sync up on the internet. Could be useful if you have multiple computer, that dropbox folder will get replicated between all of your computers that is setup with your DropBox folder... You can't do this with Mozy... Still more expensive, 10$ per months for 50GB

One more thing about Mozy, Mozy charges $4.95 per computer that is running the software, but you are allow to backup mounted drive, so you can mount the drives of all your computers and back them up, the way it work, is if a file is no longer on your computer for over 30 days or if you have not mapped the drive for 30 days, they delete it from the mozy server.

If you find something better, please let me know