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Mac Mozy Online Backup Service Announced

mfacey said:
Yeah that's the problem with a lot of consumer broadband connections; most have a very low upload speed. If you have less than 1 Mbit up, its going to be painfully slow.
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I tried out about 250MB and was done in about an hour.

Not sure if I will try the unlimited to back up 160GB. At these speeds I figure that it will take close to a month to do the initial backup.

On a side note, does anybody know how secure and reliable this service is?
 
The whole Backup progress just ground to a halt, so I did a (double) restart of my MacBook, and now the rest of the backup is literally racing at between 400 and 600 Kb/s most of the time... :)
 
Doesn't work as non-admin!

Mozy doesn't work for me. I installed it, try to run it, in the configuration dialog it doesn't show any backup sets and doesn't show any files to backup.
I googled around and found someone saying that Mozy has a problem running or installing from a non-admin account. I tried logging in as admin and it worked.

I had emailed Mozy support but never received a useful answer other than its beta and may not work.

I'm surprised that so many people get it to work. Does that mean everyone is running as an admin userid? Haven't people learned from Windows viruses and spyware not to run as admin? At least on the Mac you can usually reasonably run as non-admin, unlike Windows.

Does anyone know of a workaround to let Mozy work from a non-admin id?
 
Mozy Question:

Can I have 1 unlimited account and backup both my Imac and my macbook to it?

Or do I need 1 account per computer?
 
I believe that you need to pay 5 dollars per computer, but it would be under the same Mozy account.
 
I don't know what the fuss is all about re remote storage :confused:

I keep DVD backups of all my "irreplaceable" stuff under lock and key at work. The chances of both my house and office burning down at the same time are, err, remote :D
 
akadmon said:
I don't know what the fuss is all about re remote storage :confused:

I keep DVD backups of all my "irreplaceable" stuff under lock and key at work. The chances of both my house and office burning down at the same time are, err, remote :D
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Most people don't want to mess with backing up 50-100 gig on DVDs
 
This is a little bit outside the main topic, but...

dmelgar said:
Does that mean everyone is running as an admin userid?
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I would assume so. Apple makes the first account you create at setup an admin account, and I'd guess that most people never create another one. The setup process never explains that the admin account should be for computer administration only, and that you should create a "normal" account for daily use. I've ranted about this since the day I got my first OS X Mac running 10.1.2 -- it wouldn't be hard for them to ask for an admin password, and simply use it to create a hidden "admin" account behind the scenes. Then the setup could go ahead and create the normal account without admin rights.

Unfortunately the precedent of most OS X accounts being administrators has been there for 6+ years, so a few lazy software developers will make that assumption. I haven't had trouble with this since Quicken 2002 or so (can't remember if Quicken '06 fixed it or if I just knew how to work around it by then), but it was really annoying the few times it popped up.

Haven't people learned from Windows viruses and spyware not to run as admin? At least on the Mac you can usually reasonably run as non-admin, unlike Windows.
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Actually, I use a non-admin account on my XP Pro installation that I run in Parallels. Works fine for just about everything I do, except for the occasional software install. It's easy enough to flip over to the admin account for that, though OS X makes it easier by merely asking for the password in a dialog. I presume Vista does this as well, but I wouldn't know from first hand experience.
 
I'm hoping that Leopard will deal with this problem. I can see Time Machine linking to an improved .Mac.

Do we really think Apple is so incompetent to not have kept .Mac up to par with similar services? I think they're just relying on Leopard to allow for an effective .Mac backup.
 
tor requires an administrator account to run (and doesn't tell you, it just fails to work if your running as a user account) .. I find that mildly amusing.

Anyways, my main concern for mozy is.. for $5/month to host this insane amount of data..where do they make money? And if they don't make money, how will they stay afloat long enough to make spending a month or two uploading your data worth it...

Also, if you use a major cable provider and are backing up tons of data..cross your fingers and hope they don't cancel your account due to overuse
 
No external drives

I signed up to Mozy's service a few days ago only to realize that it doesn't back up external drives. I only have a 40 gig internal in my old iMac but 350 gigs external. Checked the FAQ and it was listed right there. OK, so my fault. No worries. But I was still curious what they're reasons were for only doing internals. So I emailed them and asked:
I see on your FAQ that only a couple external drives work with
Windows. Will there ever be Mac OS X support for external drives?

It seems to me that external HD support would not be a great
technological hurdle for your software to handle, but rather is just a
way for you to keep the size of the backups you have to store smaller.
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A gentleman named Theo promptly wrote back and sounded a touch indignant that I assumed it was a cost-saving ploy:
We are planning on supporting external HD, it is not just a way to keep the backups small.
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I wrote back asking if they had any timeline for implementing this when a different service rep responded saying that external drive support would possibly never be coming to the regular Mozy. Instead, he told me I could sign up for Mozy Pro, which has a much steeper price.

Moral of the story: I wouldn't have minded at all if they had just admitted it was a cost-saving measure. I understand that. But to try to make it sound like it's a complicated technological feat, but then tell me that they happen happen to have this technology in a sister service, seemed like a blatant money grab. Oh well.
 
mfacey said:
:)
I....in the process of uploading about 40GB of data. Right now it says that its going to take a good 8 days! I'm hoping that's a hefty overestimation!
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Eight days is reasonable. But...
  1. You only have to do this once. After that the backup is incremental so only the deltas need to be sent.
  2. You can do other things while you while. No need to watch the screen for 8 days.
 
winchest said:
I was curious how you got the Mozy client to recognize your external drive. I cannot seem to get it to see it therefore I cannot back up my iTunes directory.

Thanks
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Sounds really cool. It seems to be an actual installer required app, so I have held off on installing it as I don't want to have yet another service running all of the time. For anyone that has installed it yet, does it install some type of process that is always on?

Also the one thing that sounded weird was that you can only do a full drive backup? Maybe I am reading that wrong from the posts here but is there a ways to just upload specific files/directories rather than an entire 500GB drive? :confused:
 
winchest said:
I have not been able to figure out how to get the Mozy client to recognize my iTunes library on my external drive. Anyone have luck with this?
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I haven't tried this myself, but has anyone just tried doing an 'ln -s'?
akadmon said:
I don't know what the fuss is all about re remote storage :confused:

I keep DVD backups of all my "irreplaceable" stuff under lock and key at work. The chances of both my house and office burning down at the same time are, err, remote :D
Click to expand...
The problem I have with optical backups is I never know when they're going to go bad... I keep mine on a external hard drive, hoping that I'll detect corruption before it happens to both drives. The downside, as you mention, is that both are at the same location...
 
Hmm... $60 a year will let me upload and store in essence the entire internal HDD on my iMac (400GB). Of course, it won't be a bootable backup, so I'd limit it to the approaching 200GB of data, music, archives, photos and other items that I don't want to spend time burning to DVDs.

So, estimating about 200GB of data on my upstream should have the process done in about a month... :D

I'm still excited though - I'd much rather do a massive upload and then the incremental updates. I think that's the allure for me - I already do DL DVD backups of my most essential, would-crush-me-if-lost stuff, but I don't want to do the same for all my music, photos and other would-be-a-bummer-if-lost-but-that's-the-breaks stuff. If it runs quietly in the background and really doesn't burn too much system resources, I'll be even more thrilled that it won't be taking away from audio and video editing.
 
Well, I've just downloaded it and uploaded a few documents, nothing too hardcore, so far I'm liking the feel of this.


EDIT: Sorry Mod's, didn't think before posting referral code. my bad:eek:
 
I'd much rather have a hard drive as a backup and apple time machine, because if you lose one little file and you need that little file just search for it in time machine and there it is. Rather than looking through piles of encryped files just to find one. Then theres the whole uploading the whole of your hard drive, Its a good idea just the internet speeds just can't compare to say firewire 800 speeds.
 
Ace25 said:
What happens if they go out of business? Is your data lost?
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Probably, but at least you'll have had access to it while they were around. I'm guessing they'd maybe put up a hard deadline for downloading anything you wanted back, or maybe mail you DVDs. But, given how dot-coms can simply disappear overnight, maybe not.

xJulianx said:
EDIT: Sorry Mod's, didn't think before posting referral code. my bad:eek:
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Huh - I didn't think this would have been a violation, but I guess it makes sense. I was just about to propose something similar to the Apple Discount code thread for these referral codes...

Mac-Addict said:
I'd much rather have a hard drive as a backup and apple time machine...Its a good idea just the internet speeds just can't compare to say firewire 800 speeds.
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True - though given that Leopard has been pushed back until October, and only then th 10.5 release, I'm going to guess it will be a while until Time Machine (like File Vault) is completely stable.
 
This seems to work although there is still an outstanding bug (I think) that doesn't update the Backup Set unless the Mozy application is opened again (which updates the cache.db file).

I've gone ahead and upgraded my account to administrator level to do some testing so I'll see how that goes.

dmelgar said:
Does anyone know of a workaround to let Mozy work from a non-admin id?
Click to expand...
 
Working great

I've been using it in "free" mode for a couple of days and so far it's working perfectly.

I'm only backing up my current projects, and so the size is less than 50MB at the moment. But it just chugs away in the background. I don't even notice it. If I think to look at it it always says something like "You files were back up 12 minutes ago."

So that's great. No worries about losing my recent work, and I already have my older work backed up.

I have ref code if anybody needs one. You'll get an extra 256MB of free storage. I will too (though I doubt I'll need it). PM me.
 
Im trying it out now uploading 1.9gbs worth of itunes music.. and its jumping all over the place one minute the bitrate is 375 kb/s and then its 10 kb/s, 16 hours to go..

Edit: God damnit now I have to upload things to my server at the same time.. Lag.
 
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