I’ve been wanting to look at online backup for a while to backup photos and music and such and to supplement local measures like using a ReadyNAS with RAID and having some spare hard drives for backups.

The other day I signed up for the MozyHome trial account with 2 GB of space. I downloaded the OS X client (version 2.1.0.49) — pretty simple to install. Configuring it was a little strange — when I tell it to not back up a certain folder, it takes a very long time for it to register the change and the UI doesn’t give any impression that it’s working on it. I actually didn’t know for a while whether it was doing anything.

Finally, I kicked off a backup of 1.2 GB of files. This was on the morning of January 10. It’s now almost the morning of January 14 and the backup is only around 75% done. Now I have DSL with a paltry upload speed of 512 Kbps, but still…that should give me 100 megabytes or so per hour, conservatively. That would finish in less than 12 hours.

The strange thing is that Mozy seems to not send data for large stretches of time. Sometimes it is active and sometime there is no outbound network traffic at all (according to iStat Pro).

And taking a look at the history which tells you how much data was transferred per day:

January 10 – Files sent: 2,759; Size sent: 697.2 MB
January 11 – Files sent: 2,452; Size sent: 57.1 MB
January 12 – Files sent: 5,680; Size sent: 37.3 MB

I’m curious what’s going on here. Do they transfer less and less each day or is the speed proportional to how much you have left? Or are the backups limited to a certain number of hours?

Anyone else see this? Is this typical of other online backup services — e.g.: Carbonite (which is next on my list to try)?