It got to 22Gb before I identified it as the problem, Force Quitted Mozy and deleted the file (/private/var/log/mozy.log). I’m a bit techie, possibly your average punter wouldn’t have been able to identify this.

Yes I have mailed them too.

Over the past week there are two classic examples of why a good backup process is critical. One is the highly publicized story of the June Issue of Business 2.0 that was inadvertently deleted two weeks before print and the backup had failed. The seco…

Mozy - all the best!

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Do they keep backups of the user data at multiple sites? Is my data replicated to other servers? I’d hate to upload my data only to find my data was housed on a single hard drive in a single server in their single data center. It would be nice if the provider sites noted such information.

It is hard to do differential backups and byte-level encryption at the same time. Companies like carbonite and mozy can get away with “unlimited” backups because they reap the benefits of single-instance storage (e.g. only one copy of apps and OS files that are bit-for-bit identical between two random boxes) while you get charged for each bit you send. When you start dealing with encryption you have to ask interesting questions:

-what key (if it is user-supplied you blow the single-instance benefit and UI is a PITA, if it is based on a hash of the file then when a single bit in the file changes a new encryption key is generated so you lose single-instance storage and have to upload the entire file again)

-what cipher mode (with ECB mode you can only backup the differential bits but ECB is trivial to crack, with a chained mode like CBC or CTR then changing a bit means that everything after the block in which the bit was flipped with encrypt to something new and you lose the efficiencies of central storage, etc.)

-what is the threat model (there are some less well-known mechanisms that let you protect files from some junior sysadmin at the service provider, but making the service both cost-effective to the provider and secure enough for the truly paranoid is both hard and expensive.)

There are ways to do this securely, usually by separating the bits that are files from the bits that describe which files belong to which users and protecting the latter, but it is hard and you end up eating into the margins of the service provider because doing backups like this in a manner that is secure from both service provider collusion and random subpeonas requires more storage and more bandwidth.

I’ve been testing it out for awhile now, and have been pretty happy with it. And Matthew has personally responded on the few occasions that I was having trouble, or had any questions about it.

BackupReview.info

Mozy is ranked at #4 for this month out of 400 online backup companies.

As for Mozy…we’ll see how well this works, but I imagine I’ll stick with S3 for my mac backups though.

I have been using it for over a week now. Great service

X7D94N

the unlimited is just a theory - most PC’s have 100GB to 200Gb harddrives out of that perhaps 10-20 GB is worth of backing up - and most people will end up backing up less than that (at current levels) so it’s easy to give unlimited space just due to the fact that most people really don’t need that much space in reality.