Frequently mentioned on Lifehacker, Mozy Home is an incredibly economical network backup option at $5 a month. The online backup service will store an unlimited amount of data, and has Mac and Windows clients. The big caveat there is that you don’t have unlimited throughput, so it can still take a while to backup a large fileserver, say. In that case it’s especially important to be able to manage it effectively.
I’m currently using an old PPC-based Mac Mini, running Tiger, with a couple (or more) USB attached drives, as my home fileserver. For a long time I ran a Linux box with an internal RAID5 disk array, but with the advent of mozy and 5$ a month offsite backup, I’ve made the switch. It hasn’t been completely painless, however, so here are a couple notes about effectively using Mozy on a headless Mac.
You still probably need VNC or that fancy new Leopard desktop-sharing feature, especially to install.
Mozy has a command line interface! Enable SSH on your Mac and check this out
bombe:~ jro$ /Applications/Mozy.app/Contents/Resources/MozyBackup help
Commands: start|cancel|auth|rescan|status|tempdir
bombe:~ jro$ /Applications/Mozy.app/Contents/Resources/MozyBackup status
Status: Backing up files...
Preparing (0.0 B/s):
70.9% 4925415586 of 6943326336
Sending (46.3 KB/s): blah_blah_20061012.tgz
0.9% 87851008 of 9257768960
You can probably guess what most of the commands do. It’s great being able to start and cancel a backup on a whim, say when I upload more data to the server, or stop it when it’s messing with my VOIP call quality. I definitely recommend still having Mozy backup on a regular schedule, even if you’re doing a fair bit by hand. You never know if you’ll forget!
- Mozy has a very useful log.
bombe:~ jro$ sudo less /Library/Logs/Mozy.log 2008-03-15 12:43:55.229 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Starting backup 2008-03-15 12:43:55.231 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Checking for update 2008-03-15 12:43:56.821 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Connecting to r4165.mozy.client.ut2.berkeleydata.com (66.133.112.25) 2008-03-15 12:43:57.277 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Version is up-to-date (0.9.1.0) ... 2008-03-15 12:46:01.028 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Building backup set 2008-03-15 12:46:03.278 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Processing files in scan cache 2008-03-15 12:46:09.704 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Processing files in manifest but not in scan cache 2008-03-15 12:46:19.569 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Preparing 4 files (6943326336 bytes) 2008-03-15 12:46:19.570 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Unlocking cache... 2008-03-15 12:46:19.570 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Unlocked cache 2008-03-15 12:46:19.570 MozyBackup[31] (prepare) Starting 2008-03-15 12:46:19.575 MozyBackup[31] (send) Starting 2008-03-15 12:46:19.575 MozyBackup[31] (send) Getting files from queue 2008-03-15 12:51:12.245 MozyBackup[31] (send) Offering 1 files (0 are removes)
- Mozy can use your your encryption key. If you don’t want the guys at EMC/Mozy to know what kind of ahem data you’re storing on their machines, you can configure Mozy to use your own encryption key. This definitely increases the security of your data, just make sure you don’t lose that key, or you’ll be in a world of hurt come restore time.
