Time Machine vs Carbonite/Mozy

[ChrisA]

I worry about off site backups - what if they aren't there in a year or 2 when I really need them?

You would have notice it gone by then. The idea is that you rotate a backup to an off site location. You make a copy take it some place, then bring the old copy back and over write it. This way you touch the off site copy every week or whatever your cycle is.

You can't expect any backup, no matter what media type you use to be good after a year. Yes you can get lucky but don't depend on luck.

 

[ravencr]

I also bought a new tb buffalo hard drive with memeo autobackup, and I have nearly everything backed up onto it, as well. I'm not looking forward to having this happen again. But, I did find www.datarescue.com and it is finding pictures off my bad hard drive surprisingly. It just takes forever to do it...Only $30 though, so definitely worth it so far.

Chris

 

[philosopherdog]

Surely every file on your box isn't mission critical! I personally don't see why most end users need a complete backup of their system off site. This may be just a bit paranoid. For most people Timemachine to a local external and Mozy's 2 gb free off site does the trick. Backup mission critical stuff off site and do a complete Timemachine of your box to an external so that you can recover from a system meltdown. Anyhow, if you really do need to backup everything off site then Mozy is good. However, notice that Mozy's latest Mac client will prevent your Mac from entering sleep mode whether it's backing up or not. They say they're working on it. If you care about this, search this forum for the download link to a previous version that doesn't suffer from this problem.

 

[brycenesbitt]

Mac Sleep

At least Time Machine lets the machine Sleep. Mozy prevents sleep, which is unacceptable for a home machine in a bedroom, and unacceptable in a world with global warming.
Finding this out can be hard... OS X does not provide an easy way to list all the applications that have suspended sleeping.

Note that manually sleeping the machine still works: only the automatic sleep is suspended.