The Backup Blog

Mozy and Restore

On a scale of personal data disasters from 1 to 10, what would you rate a simultaneous double disk failure of your RAID 1 group and a more or less complete corruption of your Time Machine backup images? Pretty high I would guess. Let's call it a 8.5. The only real way it gets worse is if you simultaneously lose root.

Fortunately, I have Mozy.

(I also have a sparse bundle of backup data that I can open and read, but I can't copy files from it without getting error messages. I welcome any thoughts any of you might have on that one!)

Before I initiated a restore with Mozy I did a quick google around to see what sort of restore speeds I could expect. To my surprise, the first few responses google returned didn't leave me with much optimism.

However, not only did I not have much optimism, I also didn't have much choice. So I gritted my teeth and got down to it.

The good news (and really the only good news of the day) is that Mozy is happily restoring my data at pretty reasonable speeds: peaking at over 2.0 MB/s over my ISP connection, and averaging somewhere around 1.0 MB/s. And it was ridiculously easy to browse the data that I wanted to restore, pick a destination, and just restore. I was at about 35 GB restored when I left for work this morning, with no hiccups, burps, or other forms of nastiness from Mozy.

It is just working, and working well.

Which is really the whole point. Mozy, not just for backup, but restore too!

Mozy Family Grows

I am an enthusiastic supporter of Mozy. I have been since before EMC acquired them. I think they offer a fantastic service, at a fantastic price. Frankly, I don't think there is any other reasonable solution to the problem of home and small office backup. Carrying tapes/disk/CDs/BDs/DVDs offsite every day? No thank you. Setting up a bunch of scripts and custom nonsense to x-copy stuff to a cloud storage service? Yeuch.

So when Mozy did off-site backup easily and cheaply, I was in. Think of it as insurance for your data. And I don't mean all the cruft that litters up home systems these days, I am thinking about the stuff that counts: tax records, pictures, the sort of things that mean stuff to us, and we would really care about if we lost.

On that note, one of the things that I find most interesting is how the Mozy family is growing. Lenovo is now shipping Mozy with some of its laptops. And now Staples is offering the service to its customers under the Thrive brand. Additional coverage here.

To me, this just makes sense. I think every PC and Mac should come with Mozy. To me, this is just as important as being offered the choice of whether to use Google or MS for my searches, or Firefox or IE or Chrome or Safari for my browser. Someday soon, the data on every home and small business system will be protected this way.

Mozy Picks Up Speed

Just a quick bit of news here: as reported by the good folks over at blocksandfiles, Mozy adoption is is accelerating.

Apparently we have doubled our customer base in the first six months of this year, and are now managing an impressive 10 PB of data. Neat.

This comes on the heels of news that Avamar is experiencing stratospheric growth--triple digit growth that makes Mozy and VMware growth rates look positively glacial by comparison. Excellent news all the way around.

News Bits

Time for a brief round-up of some of the news from the world of backup and archive.

First up, news from Symantec this week that they have bought SwapDrive so that they can offer a service like Mozy. This is a great validation of the direction the market is headed for small office and home user backup. I would offer the simple observation however that the service is much more expensive than Mozy--it ranges from $4.95 per month for 2 GB of backup data (which Mozy offers for free), to $44.95 per month for 50 GB (which Mozy offers for $4.95). So it is about 10 times more expensive, minimum. I protect close to 200 GB with Mozy which I assume would cost me a whopping $179.95 per month with SwapDrive's backup.com, as compared to $4.95 with Mozy. Nearly 40 times more expensive. They also don't appear to support Mac OS X at the moment, which would be another deal killer for me.

Mozy Mozy Mozy

For this post, I just have two short, but significant pieces of news from the world of Mozy.

First, Mozy has released v1.0 for the Mac. I have been using it for a while in its 0.x "beta" form, and I have been very satisfied with it. (And for the record, it is an emphatic yes to espresso, and no to turtlenecks. You may have to follow the link to make sense of that...) I look forward to the same great user experience now that Mozy is at 1.0. As a home user (and a user on my laptop for work) I could not be happier with the speed, performance, ease of use, and how incredibly unobtrusive the application is as it does backup.

Secondly, Mozy also announced a site for Europe and EMEA, as we call Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Basically this means that Mozy will have infrastructure in Ireland, in addition to the multiple data centers it already owns and operates in the USA.