OK, I mentioned last month that I was trying out Mozy for offsite backup. That experiment is now over. Bottom line, when I had it backup about 15 Gig of stuff where only a handful of files changed per day, it seemed to work pretty well. When I added an additional 35 Gig or so of other stuff representing tens of thousands of files, thousands of which changed each day… yes, mail folders amongst other things… it just could not get itself set. It would take it almost a day just to do the scan to figure out what changed, and then once it tried to start uploading, I’d get estimates of over a week to finish the backup. Which I was willing to let it do for a “first backup”. Except for the fact that as long as it was running, either in the preparing stage or in the actual uploading stage, it seemed to slow my computer to beyond the crawling point to the almost unusable level. Now, maybe with a computer that wasn’t three and a half years old and therefore pretty slow to start with, or with a bandwidth pipe 10 or 20 times faster than what I have… maybe with that this would work for me. Or maybe if I only really wanted offsite storage for a small portion of my stuff (rather than all of it). Maybe it would be fine then. But for my particular use case… it just was not working. Not at all.

So, a few minutes ago I finally gave up and uninstalled it. I’ll have to figure out how to cancel the $5 a month before too long too. (Or Brandy will kill me, we’ve been trying to get rid of these extra monthly charges for things we don’t use, not add more of them… :-) )

Anyway, goodbye Mozy. I wanted you to work for me. I really want a good offsite backup solution, but so far the online ones still aren’t practical for me.

And the alternative, periodically cloning my time machine drive and then taking it somewhere other than my house for storage… also is a bit too much.

Oh well.