Re: House on Fire... Do You Rescue the Computer?

John Tserkezis wrote:

More importantly, does he get unlimited uploads from his ISP?

What do you mean? Of course. While I understand you are in Australia, in the US, anyone on Cable, DSL, or FIOS gets unlimited uploads.

At a reasonable speed?

2mbps up. Mozy.com actually throttles the $5/month accts to 1mbps. It's really not bad at all.

My internet access is 2mbps/15mbps for about $45 month. They are upgrading us to 5mbps/20mbps for free soon.

How practical is it unless you have some real secure encryption,

448-bit Blowfish.

perhaps more time than money? (or more money than sense?)

I'm sorry??

I have 400+ gig to go through...

While I have about a terabyte on my main PC, I only backup roughly 100+/- gigs. Mozy performs complete and incremental backups, and all of it happens transparently in the background on my PC. Relatively little CPU time is taken up, and the bandwidth usage is unnoticeable unless I'm doing another large upload to someplace else.

You can define file types and/or directories to protect, and those directories are automatically checked for changes, and those changes uploaded to mozy.com.

This isn't a bare metal backup. You don't backup Program Files and Windows directories. I backup anything user-created/original and not easily replaceable.

Online storage, the media-reputed "next big thing" is dead in the water for anyone that matters.

Hrrrmm.. I matter. My data matters to me. Media coverage or not, mozy.com works extremely well. Performs automatic background backups multiple times per day, stored off-site -- easy access to the data, including any revision of the data, often times going back 6 months. I can retrieve any version of any file that's backed up.

Mozy is one part of my backup strategy. I also burn DVD's, and cross-store copies of data on different machines.

Might be viable to Joe Average if you can convince them that storing all his porn^H^H^H^Hdata offsite at some cost is worthwhile.

Especially difficult once you tell them that anything on the internet is effectively "public" information. Even if they just have family photos and other data they consider non-critical data.

Effectively public? Are you familiar with how encryption works?

(Yes, I am familiar with the early implementations of Blowfish where there existed some weak keys. While the chance of actually choosing a weak key is slim anyways, keys are now tested prior to being used in any modern blowfish implementation to ensure they don't fall in the class.)

Does your current backup strategy allow you to retrieve a few versions of any file across any day over a 6 month period?

Keith
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