Mosey on down to Mozy for hassle-free backups

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Anyway, I decided to take a look at four different services:

IBackup IDrive-E Mozy Orbitfiles

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I looked next at IDrive-E and saw that you only get 2GB for free. Not bad, but I decided to check out Orbitfiles instead. With Orbitfiles, you get a whole 6GB for free, plus you can share files and they (supposedly) even let you sell those same files. Unfortunately, even though their FAQ says that you can sell files, that seems to be disabled at the moment. Oh well, sharing is still good, right? Maybe you have to sign up for one of the paid plans? I don’t know. At least you can set passwords on files (password: blogic) and even notify people via email that you have shared a file with them. This could be handy for someone who does something like custom artwork since you don’t want to be emailing someone a file larger than maybe 5MB. Ew. Anyway, there are two ways to add files to Orbitfiles: through the web interface or through their ‘Hercules Uploader’. At this time, the uploader is at version 0.9 and still has bugs to be worked out. It does upload files, but I’m not entirely positive it will upload all your files.  This is important, since you’ll have to double check to see if everything transfered… a pain, if you’ve got more than a handful of files. On the plus side, the both of the uploaders are easy to use. Free accounts have a limit of 100MB per file, however. All in all, Orbitfiles seems decent (though with the spelling errors on the site, it does look like it was created by a bunch of high school/college age people), but is currently unsuited for backing up large amounts of data.

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So I look again. On IDrive-E’s own front page, it mentions ‘Mozy’. What is Mozy? I’d never heard of Mozy before. So I go to look at Mozy. 2GB free! Woo! So I sign up and download. The software takes a bit to install, but once it does it tells me exactly how much data I’m trying to back up (around 9GB). Oops. So I can navigate around and tell it to take out all ‘music’ files, documents, etc. I can tweak it to only back up the files in a particular folder or all of those types of files for the whole drive. I finally got it down to just under 2GB. Phew. So after I get this set up, as I’m waiting for the backing up go, I started poking around my account page on Mozy. Apparently, for everyone I refer to Mozy, I can get an extra 250MB of storage space… and the person that signed up under me also gets an extra 250MB space. I think that’s pretty nifty. Of course, if you don’t have enough friends that you can convince to backup their computers, you can get unlimited storage space for only $5/month per computer. Down side? Every computer in your account has to be unlimited. That means $10/month for 2 computers, $15 for 3, etc. But, hey, you probably already wanted that anyway if you have multiple computers, right? On another positive note, Mozy also works for Mac computers, something that the other backup sites don’t seem to offer.

All-in-all, Orbitfiles is good for sharing the occasional random (and large) file while Mozy is good for the actual backing up of your computer. Why don’t you give Mozy a shot and see how you like it?