Online Backup Options Expand

Mac Mozy: coming soon! Mac users will soon be able to enjoy the same award-winning greatness of Mozy remote backup as PC users.

To be notified when Mac Mozy is available, fill in your email address below and the folks as Mozy will send you an email when Mac Mozy is live:

This is the message I got when I tried signing up for a Mozy Unlimited account. So if a few more enthusiasts leave their email addresses we may get it all sooner?

Thanks! We'll notify you when Mac Mozy is ready.

When that happens I'll try it cautiously.

George

>This is the message I got when I tried signing up for a Mozy
>Unlimited account. So if a few more enthusiasts leave their email
>addresses we may get it all sooner?
>
> Thanks! We'll notify you when Mac Mozy is ready.
>
>When that happens I'll try it cautiously.

It is in beta testing now. I haven't tried it because it doesn't yet
support external drives (which is where I keep all my music and
photos), so I don't know how well it works.


--
Andy Carroll
Toronto, Canada
http://flickr.com/photos/andys_camera/

I believe I've mentioned this before, but I cannot recommend Interarchy
highly enough for handling backups from your Mac to internet servers.

<http://nolobe.com/interarchy/>

It handles Amazon S3, SFTP, FTP, FTP-SSH, WebDav, and quite possibly more
methods, and has built in mirroring and scheduling, so you really don't have
to roll your own system at all. The mirroring system will also cache a
current record of what's on your remote system, so you don't need to spend
the time doing a time-consuming comparison between the local filesystem and
a remote server. A great time saver!

It also has an amazing (if poorly documented) feature called "File
Converters" which lets you run all your files through one or more
transformations prior to uploading or after downloading -- so you could
encrypt, compress, or encode your files as needed, and entirely
transparently.

I've used this to set up a very simple backup schedule that takes the
nightly snapshot from my backup computer and sends it to an SFTP server on
the web. The files are encoded using the Interarchy Backup format (so as to
save all Mac-specific goodies and metadata) and are then encrypted (since
they're on an online server, it seems a wise step) and compressed (to save
bandwidth and storage costs) prior to upload.

When I recover files, the encryption, compression and encoding is all
reversed, so it's a drag & drop operation for me! Very nice! Plus this whole
arrangement can be easily moved to other servers.

--
Nik :: gerberinik.net
Software picks, serious Mac geekery and productivity tips!
<http://iNik.net/>

I am successfully using a program called AASync which syncs from a
local folder to a remote server over the Internet via SFTP. I now
have 20 GB stored on my account at ISP Dreamhost.com. The program
takes about 90 minutes to compare all local with all remote files--
uploading any changed files takes extra time. It took more than a
month to upload that amount of data using my DSL link, mostly done in
overnight sessions.

The remote server is linux and I had to fix some file names to make
this work. I used an Automator action called "Make Names Web
Friendly". I also had to add extensions to OS9-era files so that they
would display with their application icons and open in the correct
application when restored to my Mac; a program called File List makes
droplets to automate this. I was happy to take these actions anyway
for the sake of conserving my OS9-era files so they open in OSX and
hopefully future systems. At the same time I converted old
ClarisWorks documents to Word, and saved copies of OS9 drawing files
as PICT and PDF files.

It has been noted elsewhere that you lose some metadata by saving Mac
files on a linux server, but for me this is a last-ditch backup of
documents in case my local backup drives are destroyed or lost. At
least the file dates are preserved.

It probably took six months to get this working, by the way, so do be
patient and plan in advance. The AASync developer was persistent in
helping out and fixing any problems caused by the program.

AASync
http://www.aasync.com/

Make Names Web Friendly
http://mikepiontek.com/software/mac/make-names-web-friendly.html

File List
http://www.petermaurer.de/filelist