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In case you haven’t heard, Mozy, one of the main players in online backup, has discontinued their unlimited backup plan, moving to plans based on usage and the number of computers that you have.

Now, for $5.99 you get 50 GB for one computer, or for $9.99/month you can use 125 GB for up to three computers.

For your average home user just backing up some documents and photos, this may not make much of a difference, but more heavy users are going to be hit with a big increase.

Needless to say, other online backup vendors are having a field day with this. Carbonite is welcoming new subscribers on Twitter and Crashplan is running a special 15% discount for Mozy users.

If you are caught up in Mozygate and want to switch, Lifehacker has posted the best, most affordable alternatives to Mozy for unlimited backups.

What do you think of all this? Is it the first step towards the end of unlimited online backup? If you’re a Mozy subscriber, are you jumping ship? Let us know what you’re doing in the comments.

(Photo by millicent_bystander)

In honor of the fact that I am writing this while at Macworld Expo, I thought I would point out an article from Macworld’s website.

DocumentSnap reader Brooke (a name that doesn’t at all bring back painful childhood taunting memories) pointed out this article: Which online backup service is right for you?.

If you’re thinking of choosing an online backup, it is a pretty good comparison.

If you don’t back up your Mac’s files, then it’s a matter of when—not if—you’ll lose data that’s precious to you. Apple already robbed Mac users of any excuse not to back up regularly with Time Machine. But a single bad power surge, or a true disaster like fire or vicious weather, could render your Time Machine backups worthless.

Fortunately, off-site backup is easier than ever. A slew of Web services offer affordable online backup for your Mac. These services are often simple to use as well: you install software from the service on your computer, and it backs up your files over the Internet. By keeping current copies of your treasured data far away from your home, you can feel far more confident that your files are safe.

The article runs through Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, Jungle Disk, Dropbox, and Crashplan. Even though it is a Macworld article, all of those services are cross-platform.

Do you disagree with any of their points, or do you love a service that they didn’t mention? Lets hear about it in the comments.

I always appreciate it when people put their decision-making and evaluation thought processes online when making a purchase. It helps not only them (to write it out) but the rest of us too.

I came across this post by Jonathan Camp over at irondojo where he runs through his evaluation of Mozy, Jungle Disk, and Wuala.

I don’t like making backups, but I do enjoy trying out new software (beta, if possible). Over the last several years I’ve used a number of backup systems; the merits of each I will attempt to describe here.

It’s an incredibly thorough and helpful writeup of his three contestants. Which one did he choose? You’ll have to read to find out. If you’re in the market for an online backup provider, it’s worth it.

(Photo by newsongNY)

Since I’ve done quite a few Mac posts lately, I thought I’d throw something out for my awesome Windows users (don’t worry Windows faithful, I have even more coming soon).

A while ago Mozy released their version 2.0 software, but for Windows only (the Mac version will be out later in 2010).  I thought I’d take a look and see what is new/improved.

Now Prettier

Mozy has improved the UI somewhat.  The fonts and the buttons are a bit bigger and easier to read.  It’s still not the most beautiful UI in the world, but I guess with online backup software, the important part is what happens on the server, not on your computer.

Now Faster?

Mozy claims that Mozy 2.0 is “up to” 25% faster at transferring files to their servers.  I don’t really have a way to empirically test this, but I will take their word for it that they’ve made client-side improvements to speed things up.  It’ll be interesting to see if the Mac version has similar speed increases.

Since slow uploads can be one of the biggest issues with online backup, anything they can do to speed things up is great.

Local and Online Backup

Whenever someone asks if they should go with local backup or online backup, my answer is always “Yes”.  In other words, you want to have your critical files in as many places as you can, both locally and offsite.

The biggest new feature of Mozy 2.0 is what they are calling “2xProtect”.  This new feature is sort of like what CrashPlan does.  In addition to backing up your files online, you can also back them up to a local drive. A very welcome addition.

I had a bunch of screenshots of 2.0 ready to go for this article, but my VMWare Windows install has just started going crazy so I will post them later.

If you want to check out Mozy 2.0, it is free for 2 Gigs of backup, or $4.95 a month for the Unlimited Home version.  There is also a Pro version for businesses.

In the meantime, any Windows users want to chime in on the 2.0 upgrade?  Do you find it is actually faster?  Any general experiences with Mozy pro or con? Leave a note in the comments.

According to the Mozy blog, the online backup company has just updated their Mac client.

The biggest functionality that they have added is the ability to exclude types of files from your backup. Seems like pretty critical functionality for a backup client but hey, who am I to judge?

Here’s a list of the enhancements in the 1.4 Mac client:

• Improved overall performance and stability for file selections and backups
• Added menu option to automate the collection of log files
• Moved preferences to global System Preferences
• Improved sorting for Files and Folders in Configuration window
• Improved the behavior of saving and canceling in Configuration window
• Added a new icon to indicate partially backed up folders in Configuration window
• Added menu item to start a backup from Configuration window
• Added ability to create Backup Sets to exclude files
• Added ability to sort by column in the Backup Set Editor window
• Updated online guides
• Added menu item to send product feedback or suggestions
• Improved appearance of menu bar icons and other graphics
• Improved speed of file preparation
• Added ability to use the escape (ESC) key to close the Configuration window

Has anyone upgraded to the new client yet? Any issues?

Did you know that datacenters worldwide use up as much energy as Sweden?

Neither did I, but it is one of the many things I learned from this awesome post by Mozy from a few weeks ago where they put together a bunch of stats to show how much data a petabyte actually is. Awesome!

How Much Is A Petabyte? – Mozy.com  

Photo by technicool

Recently, Om Malik wrote a post called The Ugly Truth About Broadband: Upload Speeds.

The article is about slow upload speeds in general – you can have the fastest download speeds in the world, but for many tasks that involve uploading, even our broadband is excruciatingly slow.

One of the things Om wanted to do was sync up his music collection using DropBox and backup his whole computer using Mozy.

It’s been about four days since I set everything up, and the results are dismal. Only 1 percent of my hard drive is backed up and less than 15 percent of my music has been uploaded.

The slowness of uploading to online backup services is something that is not really talked about a lot, but it is an issue at least initially.

More interesting to me are the comments on that post. In particular, people have come up with strategies to deal with the time it takes to upload everything.

When I first started with Mozy, I didn’t back-up my whole drive at once. I started with the most critical folders, and added a new one to the upload every day until it was all up. Then after almost all of it was up, I finally set it to back-up everything. Not a big issue

Personally, I just let it run and back up everything for a number of days, but I probably should have done something like that.

If you use online backup, did you just do the whole thing at once? Or did you do a hack like that commenter? Any good online backup tips? Leave them in the comments!

Recently I came across this tweet from Ross L. Kodner and he brought up a good point – one of the benefits of an online backup is having your data safe and sound.

If you live in a city that is prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, etc., it kind of defeats the purpose to have your online backup residing in the same city as you.

To that end, I have put this list together of where common online backup vendors have their data centers. Not surprisingly, none of them were willing to give this information on request so this is mainly pieced together from some Google-fu. Therefore, I can’t 100% say for sure that it is accurate, but you get the general idea.

Here is the list:

Mozy

• Salt Lake City
• Dublin
• (likely other EMC data centers)

Carbonite

• Boston
• Beijing

Jungle Disk (S3)/Dropbox
Jungle Disk and Dropbox both use Amazon’s S3 service. While Amazon generally does not disclose where their data centers are, the following are the edge locations for CloudFront, their CDN, so it stands to reason that S3 data is stored there too.
United States

• Ashburn, VA
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Newark, NJ
• Palo Alto, CA
• Seattle, WA
• St. Louis, MO

Europe

• Amsterdam
• Frankfurt
• Dublin
• London

Asia

• Hong Kong
• Tokyo

Jungle Disk (Rackspace)
Since Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace, they have started offering storage in Rackspace’s data center too.

• Grapevine, TX
• London
• Hong Kong

SpiderOak

• Chicago

Like I said, this list is likely incomplete. If you have any additions or modifications, leave a comment below.

Where is your data?

In the last few weeks, two online backup services, HP Upline and Yahoo Briefcase have both announced that they are closing.

While some have said that this is a sign that the online backup market is not sustainable, both Mozy and Carbonite have been clever and used it as an opportunity .

Nate from Mozy has posted a blog post entitled “Hey Upline Users, We Love You!” giving a discount code to ex-Upline users.

Dave Friend, co-founder and CEO of Carbonite, has posted two blog posts: one on Yahoo Briefcase and one on HP Upline, discussing the decision to close both.

By the way, I really appreciate the fact that Dave personally blogs and shares his insight. It’s great.

What do you think, is Upline and Briefcase a sign of things to come, or is it just separating the wheat from the chaff?

Recently I posted about how to backup your ScanSnap profile settings if you are on the Mac. Here is how to do it on Windows.

The ScanSnap settings are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Application Data\PFU\ScanSnap.

Obviously, “yourusername” would be replaced with your Windows username.

If you can’t see the “Application Data” folder, go up to Tools | Folder Options and set it to be able to see hidden files and folders.

Each of those “PFUSsMon0000x” folders corresponds to one of your profiles, but I would recommend backing up the entire ScanSnap folder.

If you use a backup system like Mozy or Carbonite, make sure you add the ScanSnap folder to be backed up. Otherwise, just copy the folder somewhere.

In case you’re wondering what PFU is, that is a subsidiary of Fujitsu and it is them that developed the ScanSnap.

Hope this helps to protect your ScanSnap settings. Let us know if it does.