File backups and second thoughts on Mozy

(tags backup, online)

After my brush with file loss woe despite using a RAID 1 last month, you'd think I'd learn my lesson. Well "shame on me", but making a system for backing up my files is irritating and complex, and thus I never get a backup done. I am just courting disaster, aren't I? :-/

I thought I'd try Mozy, an online backup system. Though it got rave reviews over the years, I suspected that my backups weren't stored after 30 days. After reading the article "Everybody likes Mozy--except me" (parts 1 and 2), I saw some more valid criticisms that make me reconsider my current "backup solution", such as the relative newest of the company and the clarity of the backup period. I know that my relatively slow upload speed is no fault of Mozy, but it another minus to this backup solution. It is however, unobtrusive and convenient during backup. And I did test the restore function to my satisfaction, unlike those rave reviews that seem to gloss over that. I wouldn't say its totally useless. Since restore works rather painlessly, I'm keeping it.

One thing I added recently to my computer recently is a internal 5 inch removable bay for SATA 3.5 inch HDDs. Before with PATA, you needed to put a frame on your HDD before placing in a removable bay. So the cost would be something like 3000 yen for the bay, 3000 for the frame. However with SATA you don't need to add a frame, just slide in the HDD to use it. The removable bay I bought was around 3000 yen. Since I have some HDDs laying around from the old RAID, I'll add full local backups to my backup solution using some sort of home-grown rsync based script. Too bad my current motherboard doesn't support hot-swapping SATA drives. One thing I also learned is that SATA I drives don't produce a "read/write signal" that this bay can use to flash a activity LED. You need a SATA II drive.

Other than that, I should look into a local network backup solution like Bacula, as introduced through user comments at Lifehacker's article "Are you Prepared for a Hard Drive Crash?". That would entail making another computer. Ugh.