Mozy, as you might recall, has changed its plans to a metered plan.  My renewal with Mozy would have cost me $178 to cover what I currently have backed up (which isn’t everything I really want to backup, but most of it).  Of course, that price doesn’t cover growth.

So, in addition to savings, I think SafeCopy will provide me with the best expectations of what I can expect — and what I can control — for online backup.  I can prune my backups using their web interface, I can control what is backed up and I can anticipate additional cost more easily.  My biggest beef with Mozy was the lack of tools to control my backups once they were in the cloud.  Mozy’s iPhone app was lacking — in that if you used your own encryption key, you could not use their app.  I hope they fix that.  I liked Mozy.  My account says I was a member since March of 2007.  Sadly, they are losing me before my renwal hits my bank account in June.  I am trying to get all my backups moved over before this time so that there isn’t any time when I don’t have a good offline backup available to me.  So, here goes.  More to come.

First, SafeCopy looks a lot like Mozy on the surface.  I immediately see that they are cross platform with both Windows and Mac compatibility, but they also list iPhone.  Digging a bit deeper, I have found that SafeCopy also has a search engine feature for finding and retrieving your data online and thus all your files are from the iPhone or other mobile phone.  I have to say, the Google-style search for my backup is cool.  The online demo shows that you can see versioning of the individual files, also.   Like Mozy, the backups are encrypted.  SafeCopy uses 448-bit Blowfish encryption according to their website.  

Second, their data caps for the yearly rates are really competitive and more realistic in my opinion.  They show two plans on their website a 200GB and a 300GB a year plan available for $50 and $70 a year, respectively.  I’m currently paying about $100 per year for two computers at Mozy, although both computers have unlimited storage (but only for now).  All of my data currently backed up would fit within the 300GB limit, even with versioning (a lot of my data does not change — music and photo libraries, etc.).

Third, its one account for all our home computers – meaning, while I’ve only ever run Mozy on two computers, I could potentially protect more of our home computers.  This is fundamentally different than how Mozy used to work — where Mozy used to charge by the number of computers, SafeCopy charges by data limit and you’re free to use as many computers as you want.  Mozy will limit its users in both number of computers and the amount of storage moving forward.

Beyond these three points, however, SafeCopy has some very appealing features to differentiate it from other providers that I have seen.  The first of these features is something they call “TurboCopy”.  Essentially, “TurboCopy” is deduplication, and this is one area I found Mozy to be lacking.  For instance, I have two iTunes libraries with the same music, but I backed up both on Mozy (yes, blame me for killing unlimited storage plans by wasting space like this).  With SafeCopy, it should only store a single copy of these files and then allow me pointers for both computers to access them.  That is also the best use for your storage capacity.  By only storing the single copy, you’re not consuming your storage allotment with all the same data.

The other major differentiator is real-time backup.  The SafeCopy software is constantly watching for changes on the file system and when it finds one, it moves that to the backup cloud.    There are no schedules to manage making it even simpler to setup and maintain a backup.  But, this feature also worries me.  I am concerned about saturating my internet connection — a problem I experienced with Mozy even though it had trottling.  Fortunately, SafeCopy offers throttling, also.  Saturating my connection has become a problem since I added a Microcell at home.  When saturated, this obviously affects my ability to make and receive phone calls.

So, I will be beginning my SafeCopy trial this weekend and I’ll be posting my additional thoughts and impressions after I begin the process of backing up to their service.  And that brings me to the best part…  SafeCopy offers a free account with 3GB capacity.  I’ll be starting with this initially to test and setup my computers.  Stay tuned.

And, you can sign up for Safecopy below:

First, lets start with what they changed.  Mozy moved from a backup plan of about $50 per year, per computer to a plan of $5.99 per month for 50 GB and one computer or $9.99 per month for 125 GB and up to three computers.

For many users, this is probably a non-issue.  I think of my friend Tammy who is using the service and this is probably sufficient for her — today.  But she’s a photographer, and the more she takes and imports, the larger her library will become.  I would not classify her as an excessive user, but what she was paying was fair for the service she gets.  And, she’s already gotten her money’s worth with one recovery under belt from the dead eMachine.  She will probably continue with the $5.99 a month plan (an an annual basis with one month free) and will net paying the same amount per year, until she goes over her 50GB.

But, as I said, I could be wrong.  Consumers behavior and habits have changed.  With larger megapixel cameras and lots of video and music files, the average consumer’s library of data is probably growing exponentially.  A remember an audiophile friend of mine had a 60GB iTunes library many years ago, and that was just converting his CDs into MP3 — before he started buying digital.

I’m am certainly in the top 10% of users.  I fit easily into the “blame me” category, as Stephen Shankland explains over at CNet, today.  I have a photo library of well over 100GB, a lot of iTunes music and video (to the tune of over 200GB ), and I have tons of personal video — much of it in 1080p — about 250GB in total.  The personal video and iTunes TV shows have never been backed up on Mozy, but even without them, I have well over 250GB backed up.  So, today’s change affects me greatly.

I would have a very difficult time choosing what to backup in attempts to get under a quota of 125GB.  Photos are most important to me, but equally important is all the music and video I’ve purchased from iTunes, things that I’ve spent my hard earned money on already.  [Sidenote: where is the iTunes cloud service, by the way?  Scan your library and provide access to the video online, on demand without having to push your video to the cloud -- Apple already has it there, after all.]

But cleaning up my Mozy backup is proving very difficult.  First, how do you go about removing the items you don’t want in the Mozy backup cloud?  Kinda tough without any tools to do so.  So far, I can only find one method.  If a file is deleted from your computer, it will be marked for deletion in the cloud.  I may not want to delete the stuff on my computer.  But in other cases, it may force the healthy practice of cleaning up the bad or useless photos in my photo library.  I am hoping that removing a file or set of files like (all M4V video files) will mark them for deletion in the cloud.  Time will tell, I guess, since I’m waiting on my backup to complete.

The other solution for cleaning up is deleting your existing backup and starting fresh – something I really don’t want to do.  If I start fresh, it’ll likely be with BackBlaze, Carbonite or another vendor offering unlimited backups.

Other vendors will likely follow suit.  Mozy was a pioneer of online backup and since that time many other vendors have cropped up.  Peer to peer backup is another possibility using a service like CrashPlan.  I’m already talking that over with my co-worker.

The good news for users is that your unlimited plan will continue until its expiration date.  So, you are still set for any period that you have pre-payed.  And for most users, the $5.99 plan will suffice for you in the future.  One important note, however, is that Mozy is requiring users to login and set their “renewal” plan for the future.  In ominous, bold, red lettering, there is a notice in the Mozy site that your data is at risk for being deleted if you do not select a plan…  You’ve been warned.

Enter Disk Drill. Disk Drill, made by Clever Files,  is the software I have been missing for a number of years on Mac.  There may be other software available, but I’ve never found it when I was searching.   It supports file recovery from HFS and HFS+ , NTFS and FAT formatted volumes.   The software includes both a recovery vault option which keeps a “smart history” of your file activity to increase your chances of recovering a file.  It also has a scan functionality if you accidentially deleted a file and need to try and recover it.  Like all software in the genre, if you’re using the disk you are trying to recover from, then there is a good chance that you will overwrite the deleted file.

Install is super simple – just drag the app to the Applications folder.  On first launch, a tutorial to explain how the software works appears and explains the software extremely well.  You are also prompted to install the Recovery Vault option – which appears to be optional – though I proceeded with its installation.  The Recovery Vault option require administrative access on the Mac, so you’re asked for your password to install it.

My initial deep scan of the hard drive shows about 6 hours to wait before the scan completes.  Since I am not really looking for a deleted file, I didn’t continue with the scan.  The recovery vault in the future will protect me if something accidentally is deleted.

I must admit, however, that in all my years since switching, I have not deleted anything I didn’t mean to.  I have lost work when Word has crashed a time or five, but never really lost anything by accidentally deleting it.  Could it happen – certainly – and if it were say my iTunes or iPhoto library – that could be bad.

The best bet, in any situation, is a proactive backup – Mozy or Time Machine come to mind immediately.  Perhaps I am paranoid, but I do both – sending my iTunes and iPhoto libraries to Mozy on my two primary Macs and having a full disk image backup of all four of my family’s Macs.

To be sure, this app has a solid place in the market.  Oh, and did I mention that its currently free during its beta period.

Literally, what better advertisement for Mozy could there be?  Or really for any online backup service?  That is the beauty of them – you set them and forget them and when the time comes, the only important thing you need to remember is your username and password to recover everything.

After talking it over, Tammy and her husband decided to pick up new computers on Black Friday and I setup those up the following week.  The first thing I installed upon booting up the system was Mozy and after installing, restore was as simple as choosing which files to restore (all of them) and then clicking the button.  A few short hours later, all the files were restored and Tammy was back in business.

There were a few things that cropped up.  First, the original eMachine computer was Windows XP and the replacement was Windows 7, so the default user directories had changed.  Upon restore, the files were place in a long folder hive of the original folder names.  That was easy to cleanup by moving the files.

The second thing was that little of Tammy’s data was resident on the computer.  They use email through HTC (my employer) and so all of their email is stored in Google’s cloud – so that didn’t need to be restored.  As a matter of fact, the GMail interface for sccoast.net made it very simple to switch to.  They no longer use a desktop email client.  One of them mentioned that they get lots of spam in this account, so I took a few minutes to create some filter rules to move a lot of the bulk offers they were receiving into subfolders in the webmail.  This cleaned up the Inbox to a useable form and moved all their coupons and offers into a separate folder.  With 7GB+ of data storage, nothing had to be deleted – just moved out of the way.

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.