My upgrade to Vista and experience with Mozy
July 22, 2007
I finally decided to take advantage of that disk I got free of charge over at the CS department this past semester and install it on my laptop. I took a leap of faith in Mozy and just formatted my drive to do a clean install with Vista, hoping that my data was as safe as Mozy claims it to be.
Vista installed surprisingly quick, seemed much faster than a clean XP install. Although I like all the new little things, there's not much really new in Vista that makes you get that excited. I like the new customization options for the windows with the variety of color choices and some of the animations with minimizing windows and stuff, but is it really worth the hassle and money? I don't think it is, especially with talk of the Windows 7 release happening in the next few years.
Once I got Vista up and running, I logged into my Mozy account to request a web restore of all 19 GBs of my data. It took about an entire day (24 hours) to finally have the restore built, so I'm still struggling to download it all from Mozy's server. I was presented with a 1.5 GB, (4) 3.6 GB, and a 3.1 GB self-extracting executable. I've managed to download the one 1.5 GB file but am currently struggling to get the rest of the files due to an apparent strain on Mozy's download server. I'm confident though that I will eventually get all my data and would highly recommend Mozy. You pay $54.45/year to backup, encrypt (optionally with your own key), and store your unlimited amount of data on Mozy's servers in the event of theft, hardware or software failure, or whatever else could go wrong. You then have the option to backup via web (free) or next-day delivery by FedEx via DVDs (insanely expensive).