Mozy is currently protecting about 90GB of data for me across 2 computers. It is easy to use – set it and forget it – backup. Just sign up, install the agent, select what you want/need to be backed up and it goes. You can access back ups to do restores online or they will send you DVDs of your data in the event of a catastrophic failure.

Here is a quote from the email I just received:

Thanks for being a valued Mozy subscriber. For the first time since 2006, we’re adjusting the price of our MozyHome service and wanted to give you a heads up. As part of this change, we’re replacing our MozyHome Unlimited backup plan and introducing the following tiered storage plans:

You may add additional computers (up to 5 in total) or 20 GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.

My cost only increases by a few cents per month. I think I was paying $4.95 each month for each computer (some discounts for paying for a 2 year term etc.) so the $9.99/month which includes up to 3 computers is only $.09/month than what I am paying now (and there are still some other discounts for a 2 year commitment).

I still think this is a fair price for the service and the peace of mind is well worth it so I plan to continue using Mozy.com to provide remote backups of my home PCs.

Still wish they had a Linux client.

“Mozy is a simple and safe way to back up all the important stuff on your computer. A copy of your data is stored in a secure, remote location for safekeeping, so that in the event of disaster your data is still retrievable.”

Sign up for an account, install the client, select the files you want to backup, and that’s it. There are some tweaks to allow more bandwidth to be used for backups, or backup only when idle but I just selected all the defaults. The initial backup took about 10 days for 45GBs of data, but now my data is quickly backed up daily. I am sure they are using some sort of source de-duplication similar to AVAMAR.

Here is a capture from my Mozy account of my backup data

I have not tried to do a restore yet, but I have browsed through my backed up files on the Virtual Drive created when you install the Mozy Client and using the Web restore online.

Mozy’s web restore interface

If anyone from Mozy reads this… I wish you had a Linux Client!!!

The script is just a .bat file that uses the NET USE command to map a network drive to the share on the Celerra.  This worked fine, except I noticed that only files with read access for everyone were being backed up.  All of my user profile or home directories were returning access denied errors.  I did not want to grant everyone access to all files and directories.

To fix this I had to add a username and password to the NET USE command to map the drive as a user that has read access on all directories on the shares.

I created a backup admin user for this and set all files and directories to allow this user read access.

The pre backup script mount_x.bat now looks like this:

net use /delete X:
net use X: \\NAS\Share /USER:Domain\backupadmin password

Once the backup is complete I then run a post backup script to to remove the mapping with another script umount_x.bat:

net use /delete X:

The scripts have to be in C:\Program Files\avs\etc\scripts\ on the avamar client.