Life is grand

Mozy is backup made easy. Create an account, download the client, select the directories you want backed up and then just leave it in the background. On a fast line I had my 2gb free account filled up in a few hours. Restoring files is easy; just request a package of files you want restored and a few minutes later you are emailed a link to download the package.

The unlimited version is $4.95 per-month which is peanuts really.

One thing to note is that this isn’t an Amazon S3 competitor. I can’t share my Mozy backed-up files with anyone else, I can’t even view a file “hosted” by Mozy. It is a backup service, nothing more and nothing less. For this it is much cheaper than Amazon S3.

One missing feature in the beta Mac OS X client I am using is external HD support. It is available in the Windows client but is “a few months away rough guess” in the Mac OS X client. Most of the files I want to backup are on an external HD so I will just have to wait. But the test I did with 2gb worked very nicely so I am confident the 150gb on my external HD will work fine too.

Disk Inventory X is a handy app for Mac OS X that gives you a useful view of what is taking up space on your disk. I was running low on disk space and thought I’d use it to find out what was up. Turns out I had nearly 3gb of iGarage and iDVD files that I never, ever use. So those are gone. I also cleared up some other unused files and am thinking I need to host my Parallels VM partitions somewhere else. All in all I’ve managed to clear about 5gb of files I didn’t use, a nice saving.

I just backed up the 5.5gig of my music collection to my Amazon S3 account using S3Fox Organiser. It was largely a painless process except for any song that had a # character in its name. Not sure why S3 won’t accept that but a simple rename sorted it.

I especially liked how the transfers are atomic. If for some reason a file failed half-way then it wouldn’t leave a half-uploaded file on S3. This made transfering 5.5gig painless with no worrying about what was and wasn’t uploaded properly.

Total cost? The initial 5.5gig transfer will cost me about one buck ten cents. From there on it will cost just under a dollar per month. Fantastic!