Is Mozy backup the right solution for me?

I don’t really by that one hard drive lasts longer than another. They are all pretty much the same drive. Cooling can be a factor. But not by much.

I really doubt storing the photos is making your computer slow down. Opening a folder with 40K files will slow your computer down. Doing that online would be even worse. 100X’s worse.

Long story short… Storing the files isn’t the problem. The application loading/generating the thumbnails is probably the problem.

And you should back your stuff up. I have had drives fail in six months.

Carbonite is cheaper I believe.
www.carbonite.com
however I have never used either.

Mozy is great… and I’ve used it for online backup of my critical photo files in the past. (My wife currently has 55,000 pics in iPhoto… and when it’s doing it’s facial recognition indexing, well, don’t try any heavy lifting.)

At one point, I had over 70GB stored in Mozy. But you know how long it took to get it there? Even though I’ve got hi-speed internet, the ISP generally keeps upload speed to a mere fraction of download speed. Took me nearly a month (running 24×7) to get all the files up there.

That was fine for a while. Off site backup is worth almost any hassle/expense for your critical files.

But I got tired of the poor performance (not Mozy’s fault). And I got tired of paying good money for it (not a lot, but still).

So I changed months ago. I bought a small, USB-powered external hard drive. And now I use SuperDuper! to clone my Mac’s entire hard drive (not only the critical files). And I keep that drive at my office. I bring it home once every week or so to make the clone. Then take it back.

( If you were really paranoid, you might get two drives and rotate them… always having one off-site. )

Anyways, I’m using that external drive for off-site backup in conjunction with Time Machine for daily recovery. I’m pretty happy with a relatively robust and inexpensive backup solution.

Avoid Carbonite…

A super awesome active user here works for Mozy. They seem legit. Carbonite, not so much.

http://www.jungledisk.com/

I’ve used JungleDisk, but the interface just didn’t really make me happy.
Carbonite is pretty good—restoring can be slow, but the interface is good and the price is right.
Haven’t tried Mozy

The best backup is multiple copies, in different places. I would keep your copy on the computer or an external drive, plus put them online.

Specifically for photos, I like Google’s Picasa for sorting/filing, and Picasaweb for online storage.
2GB free, 20GB for $5/year
https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage

For all types of file storage, here are the options I’ve looked at:
1)
Microsoft’s SkyDrive 25GB free
Drag and drop works with Microsoft Internet Explorer
Other browsers use the normal file browser (like the ‘Open’ dialog in most any program)
http://skydrive.live.com/

SkyDrive Explorer puts a friendlier desktop client on SkyDrive
WIndows only
http://www.skydriveexplorer.com/

2)
Microsoft Live Mesh offers 5GB free and a drag and drop desktop client.
Windows, Mac and Windows Mobile versions
https://www.mesh.com

3)
Dropbox.com is really great, highly recommended by me. You pick a folder on your PC, it keeps the folder backed up to the cloud AND any other computer where you install Dropbox.
You can also upload & download from a web browser, so you can manage your files from any Internet-connected computer.

4)
Lifehacker.com recently had a reader poll, Five Best Online Backup Tools
It should really be called “Readers’ Five Favorite Online Backup Tools

Dropbox (Windows/Mac/Linux, Basic [2GB] Free, Pro [50GB] $9.99 per month)

CrashPlan (Windows/Mac/Linux/Open Solaris, Basic [No online storage] Free, Premium [Unlimited online storage] $4.50 per month)

Mozy (Windows/Mac, Basic [2GB] Free, Home Premium [Unlimited] $4.95 per month)

Jungle Disk (Windows/Mac/Linux, Pricing: $2 per month + Per GB Fees)

Carbonite (Windows/Mac, Unlimited Storage $4.58 per month)

I can’t believe no one has mentioned SugarSync. It has all the feature of Dropbox, and it’s a true back-up solution.You can select which folders to back up as well as a special folder that will be synced across several computers. It also has cool features like audio streaming—you can back up all of your music and then listen to it on any internet-enabled computer. They even have an iPhone app (as well as Android).

Thanks for all the answers! This is really, really helpful.

SO. Maybe I’m going about this from the wrong angle. Ultimately, I just want my computer to run a lot faster. I checked my free memory last month and it was ridiculously low because of all the photos, a few movies, and music I have. Maybe I should just choose to keep all this on the computer (still using back-up, of course), and just get more memory? Someone once told me it’s easy and cheap ($20) to get a stick of RAM and insert it manually into my MacBook Pro….any advice on this?

Um… I’m not 100% sure, but I think adding RAM to your MacBook voids the warranty… also I think Mac memory might be a bit more expensive than that…

Not sure

@gggritso :: It doesn’t void the warranty. It has directions in the manual.

@melanie81 :: RAM and Hard Drive are separate things. Storing a ton of photos on your computer wont slow you down. It will slow it down if a application loads them all into RAM.

OS X will gobble up as much RAM as you throw at it. This is actually a good thing.

Running out of space on your Hard Drive will start to cause problems.

“Like, so many that it’s seriously slowing down my computer.” This could only happen if you have less than a few megabytes of space left. What’s probably slowing things down is the age of the Mac, the number of applications running or lack of RAM.

MozyHome works pretty well for me – on both Mac and PC. MozyPro needs a lot work, however – the interface is extremely convoluted and not user friendly at all.

By the way, use the following link to get 10% more space on a free Mozy Home 2 Gb account:

https://mozy.com/?code=D685JF