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We're talking hard drive failure of course. If you use your Mac at all on a regular basis chances are that someday the hard drive will fail. When it does you need to be prepared because recovery of data from a failed drive is expensive and the outcome is uncertain: you may not be able to recover anything. For a discourse on how hard drives work and their failure rates check out this Wikipedia article.
Suffice to say that everyone should have a backup plan in place before hard drive failure occurs. For my piece of mind I employ a two pronged attack: a Time Machine backup on a connected external Firewire drive and a Mozy Unlimited account backup.
For everyday use, if I accidentally delete a file that I later discover I need, Time Machine works well and in my opinion is the best thing to hit the Mac in years. What happens, however, if your home suffers a serious catastrophe? What happens if, God forbid, your home or apartment is destroyed as a result of a fire, flood, high winds, an unusually severe power spike, burglary, etc.? You need an offsite backup plan to counter these disasters.
You could, of course, just arrange to store an external hard drive at a willing friends or family member's home but then you need to be diligent about keeping to a rigid backup and rotation schedule. Even for the most disciplined were disaster to strike you're probably still going to lose a significant amount of data: all the stuff since your last backup on the hard drive at your buddies house.
I say forget all that and start backing up online.
Online backups aren't a new idea but they haven't been very practical for most people because of the need for reasonably fast internet connection. Today most people do have access to broadband internet so online backups become much more viable and appealing. After researching the available Mac options I settled on Mozy. For $4.95 per month I get an unlimited amount of storage space and a dedicated OS X client for configuring backups. Mozy also offers a 2Gb free account but as my backup needs number in the 100Gb's plus range, well that was just out of the question.
Mozy for OS X (Tiger and Leopard only) works well albeit slowly (more on this below). Just install the OS X client and then configure what you want Mozy to backup. You can choose to back up "sets" like your iTunes library or Address Book or you can choose to backup files and folders. I chose the second option and eventually choose about 120Gb's of data. From this point on backing up to Mozy is pretty painless and mostly happens without any interaction from you.
I bet you're wondering "what the heck is throttling"? Sounds painful right? Actually it makes your backing up less painful by limiting the bandwidth that Mozy is allowed to use for uploading your data. If you didn't throttle Mozy your web browsing speed and any other internet related activities (uploading a website for example) would slow down substantially. As you can see from the screen shot you can also throttle Mozy all the time.
After you have everything configured and have made an initial full backup to Mozy's servers, Mozy then incrementally backups up changed files. It's all automated and works slick.
If disaster does strike you have a couple options for restoring your data. You can pick and choose which files to restore from the Mozy client, your account via your web browser or you can choose to have Mozy burn your data to DVD and send them to you which takes 2-3 business days. The first two options work well if you have a small amount of files to restore. The last option is really the only practical one if you've got a lot of date to replace. Currently, it'd cost me $130. For me its completely worth it. Can you imagine loosing all your digital photos, home movies, work files and projects, etc? $130 is small change compared to that catastrophe.
So what are the downsides? Well, if you're the paranoid type, no doubt you won't want some faceless company having access to all your personal data. Mozy does come with encryption and from the looks of it pretty substantial encryption. You can choose to let Mozy create your unique encryption key or to furnish your own. I'm not the overly paranoid type so not only am I okay with uploading my backup date to Mozy but I also let them create my key. I'd surely forget and or lose my own personally created key anyway so letting Mozy take care of that chore is just fine.
Obviously it's a subscription service. You have to pay up each month (unless you have the free 2Gb plan) in perpetuity to have access to your data. That's just the way it is and I quickly got over it.
The initial backup is slow. And by slow I don't mean hours but days and weeks. This of course depends on your broadband connection speed and how much data you're uploading but for me it took well over 6 weeks. Had I just let Mozy do it thing un-throttled all day long it probably would've only taken a week or two but I use my iMac constantly so that wasn't an option. I also set up my Moms iMac to backup to Mozy. She had about 10Gb's of data and her backup probably took 4 or 5 days.
All in all I think Mozy Unlimited is a great option for offsite data backup. At $4.95 per month it's a steal when you compare that to the effort it would require to restore all your data from scratch. Not only that, if you're anything like me much of the stuff on your Mac is irreplaceable: digital photos of your kids, family, etc. What price do you put on that? $4.95 is cheap if you consider the piece of mind that backing up your precious memories to Mozy can provide.
For more information on Mozy free, Unlimited and Business accounts go to: http://mozy.com
Joe Henry
AYAAW