For the last eight years or so my life’s work has been done on a laptop’s hard drive. I’ve had a couple bad crashes and lost things but luckily, I’ve not lost everything. I try to do backups to an external drive but that does not happen as regularly as it should. Someone I know had their house burn down. Nobody was home at the time and nobody was hurt, but they lost everything. Insurance will replace the house, clothing, car, computers, etc. But the real loss was their electronic lives. They did backups to DVDs and an external drive but all of that was also in the house. This got me to think about my life a bit.

I finally decided to take the plunge and start backing up to an internet backup service. I did some research and most seem to offer similar features. The main requirement for me is a native Mac client. This cut down the list. I finally choose Mozy. Mozy offers an unlimited amount of storage for a fixed fee of $4.95 per month. That said, you’re limited by your internet connection and the software’s bandwidth throttling. At best, you get about 1Mbits/sec. According to their site you can backup around 9GB per day.

Most of the time you should not be backing up that much data as the software only backs up files that have changed since the last backup. The long poll is the first full backup. In my case it’s going to take a bit. I’m just backing up my user directory which has photos, iTunes, etc. I broke it down into a critical first backup, then added photos, next iTunes, and finally work stuff. After each backup completes, I add in the next grouping of files to be backed up. Once every thing’s backed up, the software runs based on a set schedule and internet access. I can travel and still have backups performed. I can grab something that was backed up via the internet and pull it down to a different computer.

Critical first backup 1.1GB

+ Photos = 10.4GB

+ iTunes = 11.2GB

+ Work = 20.9GB or 23,245 files.

My whole home directory = 53.4GB which is mostly virtual machine images, backup of my main 4GB thumb drive, German T.V. downloaded for Petra, and other misc software packages/downloads.

I guess my digital life is bigger than my real life. Petra has her basement, I have my hard drive.