I’ve about 120GB of photo’s that I backup on DVDs and an external harddrive.

What I’m really bad at, is taking these backups off-site (a.k.a. somewhere else that will not be affected if the house burns down).

I used to copy it all to my own server (it was in a hosting facility), but as I’ve moved everything to a hosting service, that doesn’t make sense any more as they have limited storage.

I looked around a bit and mozy.com, seems to have a good reputation. 5us$ a month for unlimited space, is very cheap for that kind of peace of mind.

I can’t help but thinking that it’s to cheap. But doing the math, it’s rather easy to see that, even with 120GB they will be making money of me within the year:

Back of envelope math: a one TeraByte hard drive is about 300us$, (120/1000)*300=36$. In a raid5 array, every fifth drive (depending on implementation) is for error checking so you need to multiply with 1.25 = 45us$, plus admin and network traffics costs. Probablty still less than 60us$.

The software seems quite okay, and is available for windows and OS X. No linux versions seems to be available, but as I do most of my photo work in LightRoom (and windows), this really is a non-issue for now.

The software has been running for a couple of hours now and is a 0.6% of the total 120GB, it’s not maxing out my upload speed, but it’s doing a good enough job, and it will be done in a week or so…

I’ll let you know what I think of it when I’ve used it a bit more…

p.s. one week later: It’s still uploading. It’s uploaded about a fifth of the 120Gb. I’m not sure how I could mis-calculate that badly, as it’s has been running 15 hours a day all week. As I have 2048Kbit upload the max is closer to 1.5-1.7Mb/s, but I’m unsure if the limit is at Mozy or somewhere between me and Mozy. Actually my theoretical daily upload is 22GB, so my first estimate isn’t that bad and my actual throughput is just really, really bad. My guess is that it’s a lot worse during the work hours, where the nets are a lot more busy.

p.s. One month later: nearly done uploading :-).

p.s.: May 2010: I’ve uploaded a total of 337Gb (uploading is a lot faster now)