I had been worried about losing my digital home movies.  That data is really too large to really push out to a backup service like Mozy and when I load new movies, its usually to the tune of 20 or 30GB at a time, which would take weeks to push up.  In addition to that data, I also have Movies and TV shows that we have purchased through iTunes.

So, I knew that I wanted some sort of external storage with at least mirroring capabilities to protect the movies as best I could.  Back in January, I was close to buying a Western Digital mirrored external hard drive from the Apple store.  I chose instead to get a 1TB, single external drive with Firewire as an upgrade to my 500GB Time Machine which was almost full, and wait for a better solution.

Since it was first released, I have always been in love with the Drobo.  I describe it as an mini-EVA to my co-workers, because it mirrors a lot of the HP Storageworks EVA functionality – like drives auto-leveling and automatically striping data across disks in the disk group.  Maybe, I just like the idea of having something that advanced attached to my home computers…  and I’ll be the first to admit that they don’t compare — they are apples and oranges.

But I do love what the Drobo offers, and so I have been watching them for some time.  Since its introduction, the Drobo had gone from a single device with USB only, to an enhanced version which has USB2 and Firewire (my choice of devices), a version which adds eSATA with USB and Firewire, and several larger devices, the Drobo Elite and the Drobo Pro, which feature iSCSI and NAS functionality targeted towards SMB’s.

As a side note, the Drobo Pro is even VMware certified, and I feel like it is a great solution for small to medium businesses looking for shared storage for an vSphere deployment.  This past week, we attended the Charlotte Regional VMware Users Group meeting, and actually got to see one of the Drobo Elite units on display.

The price has held steady on the Drobo that I have been watching.  At a $399 price point, I couldn’t justify buying it and then having to purchase drives to go inside.  But, as I said before, B&H was offering a great deal – the Drobo device at $100 off its normal MSRP.  It was a good $50 less than I could find it anywhere else, and so I bit — err bought.  I was able to equip it with two Western Digital Caviar Green (my wife would be proud) 1TB drives from NewEgg for a cost of $138.  And so, last night I finished up my transition of data and have everything I wanted protected on the Drobo – and I’m happy…

Data Recovery, like VCB, is an agentless backup technology used to grab either full VM image or file level backups of virtual machines in ESX.  Data Recovery also includes de-duplication technology and backup to disk, where VCB is just a method of obtaining the thin VMDK file to be backed up by a third party solution.  Data Recovery also makes use of innovation in the virtual hardware version 7 which allows for block level change tracking.  Although, Data Recovery can apparently (not 100% sure) backup earlier versions of virtual hardware, it won’t be nearly as fast because they lack the block level changes.

Data Recovery deploys in two parts – a virtual appliance and a plug-in for vSphere client.  The virtual appliance is imported from OVF format and with some basic configuration is ready to begin backups.  An IP must be configured and a VMDK must be added to the virtual appliance as a target for the de-duplicated data.  You may have two destination storage locations of up to 1TB each for a total of 2TB per virtual appliance.

Creating jobs for back are pretty simple.  A nice feature for this is that you may choose folders, hosts or clusters as part of backup jobs – meaning that any new VM’s included in that folder will automatically be backed up in addition to the existing VM’s.  This is a nice function for future-proofing your backup strategy.

Backup jobs are scheduled with a backup window to work and there can be up to 8 jobs at a time running, but the virtual appliance does all the scheduling and deciding of when to run the backups.  After an initial backup is run with all data, incremental backups are run from that point on – grabbing on change blocks.  Retention policies are also set for your backup stores and then enforced to keep a number of versions for your backups so that you can go back to a point in time backup.

Destination storage may be unmounted and exported, backed up or otherwise saved, though this is a manual process.

As another note, this is only available on vSphere hosts and cannot backup ESX 3.5 or vCenter 2.5 infrastructures.

File this under the “why’s that happening” category…  About a week ago, I noticed that my MacBook Pro’s Time Machine stopped working.  It has been working flawlessly to an external drive hosted on my iMac at home, but I wanted something to back it up when I was on the road – for an upcoming trip where we’re likely to have lots of photos.  (My friends lost a hard drive in their Mac while traveling across the country.)

Today, I found an article in ComputerWorld which links Mozy Backup to problems in Time Machine.  On further investigation, it is my problem.  As soon as I loaded Mozy on my MacBook Pro, the Time Machine problems began.  Unfortunately, I thought I had a corrupt spare image file on the backup volume, so I purged it and tried to start over.  Unfortunately, I was unable to start over and successfully backup my Mac using Time Machine.  After a couple tries, I did get it to work, only to find the next morning that it too had reported a problem with the disk image and had failed.  So, I’m down on my Time Machine, but for anyone else seeing these problems, thought the link above might be useful.

Here is an additional link:  the Apple Support Forum discussion on the matter.

Surprisingly, though, I had much better performance at home on the upstream, also, over the weekend.  Although not nearly as fast as at work, my home connection and the Mozy client was preparing and streaming content constantly without the interruptions in between as new data was prepared.  It seemed to be a fluid process this go around, so I’m not sure what may have changed in the software or in the backend to have improved the process, but it was greatly improved.

So, just another quick update.  The incremental updates from Mozy at home when I have added new photos to the iPhoto library and other incremental changes have been very smooth and quick to pick up.  There is a lot of light at the end of the tunnel once your initial backup completes.

After setting up her selections to backup, just need to point it to a destination.  CrashPlan makes that really simple.  You have 4 options – folders, computers, friends or online.  

We’ll start with folders and computers – both are local backup locations either the local computer or a computer on the local network using normal file sharing.

The real power of the product is the ability to backup to a friend.  CrashPlan sets you up with an access code – a 6 digital, alpha-numeric string that you can share with your friends.  When you choose backup to a friend, you input their code and it automagically connects you to them and allows you to stream your backup to their computer wherever they might be.

The CrashPlan client also handles and sets up its network connection to publish itself through your local router and map the correct port back for its traffic.  In the worst case, as I had to do last night, you have to enable port forwarding to a particular IP address to allow the traffic through the router (an older Linksys model, in my case).  I also setup the client (a desktop) with a static IP address for good measure with the port forwarding.   Nicely enough, CrashPlan identifies your friends with a nice grey sphere/green sphere icon to let you know who is available and who is not – green means you’re good.  What CrashPlan has done well is really simplify what could have been a very complex configuration for a technical user into something that most home users can accomplish on their own – kudos for that.

There is one more destination option – a hosted solution – called CrashPlan Central that is their online vault offering.  If you’re friendless (because, yes, most of us geeks aren’t so social) or if you find yourself wanting a secure location to backup your data, you can opt for the pay-for CrashPlan Central option.

There are a few additional things to note – one being encryption.  CrashPlan encrypts all data on site and then transmits it securely to the offsite backup in its encrypted form.  Its is stored – at rest – in an encrypted form, so that means you’re buddy won’t be parusing your, um, collections of things.

After this successful setup, I’m going to be setting this up for myself as well.  One of my friend’s has offered and will probably oblige with hostings backup for each other.

I should also note that CrashPlan offers a Pro solution for business customers.  From reading, it looks like its a more technically involved solution and includes a server product as well as client products.  I can’t seem to work out if the Pro server product self advertises like the consumer product, but it didn’t appear to.  It looked to be more of a self-contained backup solution.

As I’ve chronicled, I think the initial backup is the biggest challenge for all online backup solutions, Mozy included.  My experience taking one month really isn’t that bad given a relatively slow upstream connection and 60GB plus of data to backup.  The process was relatively easy, though I needed to throttle the bandwidth to keep my Internet connection usable while I was at home.  Thanks to a comment on an earlier post, I was able to find that very hidden setting in the Mozy client.

Throttling the bandwidth solved one problem, but presented a new one – it took longer to completely my initial.  Even with bandwidth throttled, it seemed to affect my normal activites online were degraded.  So many nights, I’d stop the backup when I arrive home and start it back (when I didn’t forget) before going to bed.

All in all, I’m impressed.  Its a nice product and the price is right.  Even though I had the paid account for a year, its taken me to month 11 to actually let it back something up, so I get to renew my newly backed up account at the end of this month.

The feature that I liked most about this product is its smart filters.  Out of the box, the configuration screen comes with a set of handy filters to easily pick and choose what to backup.  For instance, if I’m a writer and I want to protect all my Word documents, just check the box for Word docs and whalla, its going to find those on the entire hard drive and back them up.  And in my Mac version, it includes filters for iCal, Mail, Pages, Numbers, etc. out of the box.  Its a very intuitive package and would be easy for any in-experienced user to use.

HTC has been looking into reselling the Mozy service to our residental customers, and after my experience, I can say that I fully endorse that option.  I think this is a service that all users should have, even if not for all their data, for their critical data.  As a matter of fact, I have several that are coming to mind right now that I should sign up for a free 2GB account.  I guess I have a few emails to write and a few phone calls to make…

Beyond that, the backup is progressing nicely.  I have less than 10GB of data left to be processed and uploaded.  I think that we will be complete by the end of next week, if not sooner.

Since some data is now online, I am able to see the restore features of the Mozy website.  As somone from Online Backup Reviews commented earlier, Mozy has added the feature of getting your data (snail) mailed to you in the event of a disaster.  The rates are significantly better than Backblaze’s simliar service.

I let my Backblaze trial account lapse.  I haven’t done much more with that software, but I genuinely liked the service and the yearly cost.  I didn’t like the offline restore cost, though, and that kept me from subscribing.  I thought those prices were very high ($99 for DVD?).  I may sign up for a trial of another vendor just to see what the experience and software is like.  More updates soon.

So, I setup my iMac at home to use my Mozy account.  I had signed up for full service a long time ago, but I have to admit, I was too impatient to let the initial backup complete.  So, this time, I made a consious effort to backup only the data that I knew I didn’t want to lose and leave away things like the system files and applications which I knew that I could replace easily.  That brought my data total to about 60GB to backup on my intial.

I knew that I would be out of town for a few days and so I let the initial kick off and begin working.  Mozy has two parts to its process on the client.  It prepares the files for backup, encrypting, compressing and doing whatever other magic it does and then it streams that to the servers.  The problem that I see is that the client software seems to do things one at a time.  There have been many times when I log in and see that the backup stream has stopped (0/bytes per second) and there is seemingly no activity.  That doesn’t bode well for a service where I have already given up because of backup times.

But its not all bad.  I’ve been impressed with the amount of data moved to the Mozy servers.  I was away for 3 days and as of this morning, it has backed up about 12% of my 60GB, running all day and all night.  Across a cable modem with limited upstream, I didn’t think it was doing a bad job.

The client interface to Mozy is simple and offers the ability to selectively backup your data by file type, which is a nice feature.  But you’re not locked to that simple approach, you can choose or deselect particular files and folders to be backed up.  This is the route I took as I knew where my data was and I knew what I wanted to backup – mostly iPhoto, iTunes library (minus TV Shows & Movies) and my Documents where I keep all my important stuff.  With online backup, choosing what to backup is very important.  On a Mac, there is some benefit to the way the OS is constructed, however I’m not sure how you’d fare on PC where so much of your installations and data could be tied to the registry.

Crippled upstream on Internet connections seems to be the biggest hurdle that any of these backup services will face with home users.  Mozy, iBackup, Symantec, Backblaze, etc. are all affected by this.   The real golden answer is an offline initial to some media that is then shipped to the service – then incremental forever.  But, that has logistical problems.  I just wish I could find a home backup service offering this.

At this point, I’ve still got days left on my Backblaze trial, but already being a Mozy customer, I’m not sure there is enough different to make me switch.  Jury is still out for now…