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!