Mozy Windows & OS X backup

A while back I switched from ChronoSynch to SuperDuper! for my OSX backups. While Chronosynch seems to do an adequate job, it cannot match SuperDuper’s ease of use and rock-solid stability. There is also some apparent shortcomings with Chronosynch that made me switch.

I backup the entire drive daily to a local FireWire drive and it works beautifully. SuperDuper’s smart update only backs up changed files and takes ~15 minutes. Since the Mac easily boots from external drives (not USB), I also reboot about once a week from the backup drive to make sure things work okay.

This would be perfect if I had only a single machine, but I have at least three active machines, one Windows and two Macs. I don’t want three separate backup drives (partition + having to move a single drive = tedious = backups not being done), since the active portions of backup on my two other machines are quite small.

I could set up a network shared backup, but then I would lose the immediate ability to boot up from the clone, which is such a tranquilizer.

Looking into internet backups, I found Mozy which provides 2 GB free, and works for both Windows and OS X. You can have multiple machines backed up, as well. It lets you encrypt your data locally (so only you can decrypt it), and for a small fee, you can get unlimited storage.

Not bad! I have used it for a bit and it seems to work.

Only caveat now is that Mozy support seem to be lax on answering emails, something that both Chronosynch and SuperDuper manage in an hour or two, and that the Mac decrypt client needs some work (when you restore a backed-up file, the UI mistakenly uses the pick file selector, but you’re supposed to select source and destination directories), but it’s early yet, so we’ll see.