Choose premade Backup Sets, roll your own sets, or specify certain files and folders.
It’s a fact of tech life: Every hard drive will someday die. And offsite backups can be safer than backing up to an external hard drive plugged into your Mac—what if your house burns down? MozyHome offers low-cost online backup with unlimited storage, and it’s practically as simple to use as Leopard’s built-in Time Machine.
Getting started is incredibly easy—just sign up at www.mozy.com and download and install the Mac client. The Backup Sets list contains common things you might want to back up (email in Apple Mail, your Address Book, application preferences, your Movies folder, and so on), and you can edit these or add your own backup sets for more precision. Or use the file browser to back up whole folders.
The interface is easy to use, and as you select things to back up, Mozy tallies the total number of files and their cumulative size. The preferences let you choose automatic or scheduled backups and even limit the amount of bandwidth Mozy uses.
Depending on the size of your backup queue, the initial backup will, quite understandably, take forever. Don’t pay too much attention to the “Time to finish” estimate—ours would range from 12 days to 5 days to 2 days, back to 12 days within the span of a few minutes. (Mozy estimates it can upload 2GB to 4GB a day over a regular DSL line, up to 9GB on a very high-bandwidth connection.) If Mozy is interrupted when backing up, it’ll just resume the next time you’re online.
Thankfully, subsequent backups go much quicker. Mozy scans your hard drive for changes and only backs up new or changed files. It works in the background—we didn’t even notice the subsequent backups as they happened. Your files are protected during the transfer by 128-bit secure-sockets layer encryption, and Mozy uses 448-bit Blowfish encryption to keep your data secure when it’s stored on their servers.
Click the menubar icon and select Restore Files to launch the Mozy Restore client, in order to browse your backed-up files and restore them to your local machine, where they’re decrypted and ready to go. You can also restore files through the Web interface at Mozy.com or even order DVDs of your data (for a $29.95 plus 50-cents-per-gigabyte processing fee, and the FedEx Next Day shipping rate).
But this is a backup, not an archive—if you delete a file locally, it’s removed from your backup after 30 days. So it’s not a place to, say, offload files you want to delete from your laptop but still retain a copy of.
Affordable, secure online file backup. Easy to configure and schedule. Lots of support on Mozy’s site.
Slow initial backup, but that’s hardly Mozy’s fault—uploading securely takes time.
(click to enlarge)
craig
October 20, 2010 at 6:37am
Dropbox allows you to share files between your computers and phone with ease, as well as to share files with friends by giving them a download link. to start with an extra 250MB of free storage use a referral link to sign up. if anyone needs one use this: http://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTExMjAzMDUwOQ
jam0715
September 23, 2010 at 11:25am
Mozy and Carbonite both seem to be very reasonable options based on service quality, available space for back-up and price. For the nominal user, Mozy even offers up to 2GB free according to an article I found comparing both backup services. You can read the comparison at http://factoidz.com/online-backup-services-my-comparison-of-carbonite-vs-mozy-backup/
jacky2000
August 12, 2010 at 12:03am
www.DriveHQ.com cloud service is also available on Mac. In fact, DriveHQ offers online storage, online backup, online sharing and collaboration, FTP Server hosting, email server hosting, web server hosting and WebDAV drive mapping services. Most of features are available on Mac, except DriveHQ FileManager; you can still use any FTP Client software, such as FileZilla (http://www.drivehq.com/ftp/ click on software tab) to access DriveHQ cloud storage. On Mac, WebDAV drive mapping is also supported. For more info, please visit:
http://www.drivehq.com/mapdrive/
maczilla
August 09, 2010 at 11:53am
I found a good place where I can backup everything and makes folder to share things with my customers. Its called STOCKLii! You can go see by yourself at http://www.stocklii.com/en. Its A1 ;)
jlbfor
December 30, 2009 at 8:46am
Although DriveHQ does not have a Mac client it is still very useable.See http://www.DriveHQ.com.
See also my website for more lists and links on the subject of online backup.(http://www.online-data-backup-info.com)
Maclover85
December 04, 2009 at 2:12pm
In my opinion carbonite is the way to go, never had any problems so far.
ammarvvip
November 11, 2009 at 8:31am
thank you ar..is niceE#
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benet
November 10, 2009 at 8:26pm
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John_Gordon
October 30, 2009 at 2:45am
I have online account with backupandshare.com.It is the easiest and user friendly service I have seen so far but with almost everything you need as an online backup application. They are also providing Windows mobile backup solution free for their users. So far very good experience, no wonder they are the current topper in http://top10onlinebackup.com
Maclover85
September 27, 2009 at 10:15am
Great article, personally as a new Mac user I have recently started to use Carbonite and without a single complaint, its very good. I would recommend fellow Mac users to make the change to Carbonite
quesonacho
September 24, 2009 at 6:19pm
I tried Mozy based on this review. I had trouble from the start - backups not going to their server, file retrieval failed. It never seemed to work properly. And when I contacted support, I was ignored. No response to my e-mails, no one answers their phone (kept getting voice mail). AVOID THEM. I'm trying Backblaze, hope they do a better job.
ilikeimac
July 31, 2009 at 9:28pm
The summary chart at the end of the article shortchanges Dropbox on a few points: (1) Dropbox does keep deleted files. Till recently it kept them forever, but now free accounts only keep deleted files 30 days, while paid accounts keep them forever. (2) It does have a speed throttle; go to Dropbox menubar icon -> Preferences -> Network. I've heard the "Automatic" setting is 70% of your upload speed.
Timinator
November 04, 2009 at 6:20pm
Just wanted to say I LOVE dropbox. I've been using it for a few months now. It's nice to be able to host a file somewhere easy when I need it. I also like using the "copy public link" option to send people download links for large files.If anyone need a referral link so you start with an extra 250 megs of space here it is:https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTI4NDc0MzY5
tellis30
July 28, 2009 at 5:34am
Guess I'll just keep "Mozying along" Always there, always backing things up. Love it!!
clintbradford
July 27, 2009 at 1:08pm
EVERYONE seems to love Carbonite. Am I wrong to think that I want to be able to control my backups, and be able to schedule them when I want them to run? Carbonite for Windows allows scheduling - but not for Mac.
