Mozy: Off-site Data Back-Up Solution (Review)

I finally committed to an off-site data backup solution (Mozy). I ended up going with a two year deal and saved 20% with this Mozy promotional code. I have to say though, I'm really not all that impressed. I'm glad that I have a service just in case of theft or fire, but I have no intentions of using this service again when I'm up for renewal.

For starters, the application itself is very slow. One of the neat things is that it (supposedly) encrypts all data housed on their servers. It's kind of moot for me because I keep all of my important data encrypted. However, the application isn't very efficient. It will encrypt a bunch of data and then stop encrypting while it uploads the information to the server. Come on now ... the year is 2009, we've been working with multitasking machines for, what, 15 years? While that's uploading, keep encrypting ... move on to the next file, don't get lazy on me.

With this application you can specify which files or folders to backup. I created a folder called "NoBackups" which is used for material I specifically don't want to back up (which I marked as such). You'd think that if I put something in that folder, Mozy would not back it up. You'd think that ... but you'd be wrong. Instead, Mozy sees a new item and decides that it should make a backup of it regardless of whether or not the folder is marked as 'backup'. This oversight on their part makes for a good bit of wasted bandwidth.

I recently stumbled across ADrive. I like that they have a free 50G account. I'm curious to see how that works. I might have to look into that more thoroughly when I decide to mozy away from my current company.

Until next time ...

D

Ubuntu Studio - Eliminate Checksum Error

A friend of mine recently sent me a link for a distribution of linux called Ubuntu Studio ... a special flavor of Ubuntu geared towards people that produce media in various forms (audio, video, print, web, etc.).

I checked out the site and decided to give it a whirl as a virtual machine using an application that I previously reviewed, Virtual Box. I encountered 2 major problems.

The first, I kept getting a checksum error whenever I tried to install the application. I downloaded the ISO directly from the site, a mirror, and even using a torrent provided by the US web site. I finally managed to stumble across a "how to", which was only helpful to the extent that it gave me another avenue to explore.

On my computer, I have a virtual CD/DVD drive courtesy of Magic Disc. I was using this to mount the ISO which I had downloaded. I've used this exact method before with Ubuntu, DSL, and even Windows XP and have never had this problem. I was then giving my virtual machine full access to this drive. For whatever reason that was not working ... however, when I mounted the ISO from within Virtual Box itself, the problem disappeared and I was able to mount the disc without any problems.

If you are not using VB 2.2.2 - you need to download that. No matter how much RAM I tried to allocate to the virtual machine, it would always hang. Updating to the latest version solved that problem.

I wish I could give a little bit of a review on this distribution of Linux ... sadly, my laptop (1.7 gHz Pentium-M, 1G RAM) is not powerful enough to run it as a VM. Perhaps I'll put it on my tower and we can see how well it runs. That's it for now. Until next time ...

-D