Excellent online backup service - Mozy

So a little over a month ago, I was freaking out. My wife and I had decided to end the madness of having data strewn across three laptop computers (two of them old and obsolete), a desktop computer (rather old and obsolete), an external hard drive, and numerous CDs. I undertook the laborious task of consolidating all of our personal data into one place. The most tedious - but in many ways, also the most rewarding - of these tasks was organizing and deduping thousands of digital photos we had. Some dated as far back as 1998.

Of course, no sooner did I have this done than I began having visions at all times of the day and night of my hard drive crashing and losing years upon years of precious digital memories. While I felt somewhat safe mirroring the external USB drive to the laptop and backing up once a month, we wanted to keep the external drive in a locked safe under the bed. I knew that backups would only happen once a twice a year with the hassle of pulling it out, setting it up, and running the backups - and I couldn't let that happen.

So what else could I do? I could join Smugmug or use Picasaweb and back up all of my digital photos there. In fact, I do use Picasaweb - but it's more for public photo sharing of compressed images (1600x1280) and easy access from any PC or device. Also, online photo sharing services are not complete backup solutions. Even though I'm primarily a Google Docs & Spreadsheets guy for almost all of my personal files now, there's a fairly significant archive of personal data and MP3 files that I want backed up.

That's where Mozy came in. I've had an excellent experience with this incremental, continuous online backup service. The initial backup requires patience - it can take a week or more, depending upon the data - but after that, it's more or less invisible and requires absolutely zero thought and effort on my part. And it only costs $5 a month for unlimited storage space.

Take away my backup worries for $5 a month? Well worth it.

I also tested Carbonite, which also had great ease of use and setup. But Carbonite couldn't handle backups from external USB drives - so Mozy got my business.

Customer service has been outstanding. Mozy had a short period of irregular access in terms of backup, and to make amends, the founder sent an email to every customer apologizing, stating what had been done to rectify the situation, and offering customers a choice of what level of remuneration they felt was fair for their level of incovenience - 1 month free, 2 months free, 3 months free, or no worries - no free service required.

It was an incredibly standup thing to do. It's incredibly rare for a company to allow customers to pick what kind of compensation they think is fair for outages or interrupts. I felt incredibly valued as a customer and my respect for Mozy and its leadership grew tremendously.

I haven't seen a glitch since then, and can count myself as a very satisfied customer.

Crappy Stuff

I'm starting to have very little patience with the crappy stuff in my life. Time is getting too precious to spend 5-6 hours diagnosing a problem on my car, going to the store to get repair parts, researching how to install and reinstall the broken parts, getting out my tools, actually doing the install and reinstall, testing the fix, cleaning up the car, and cleaning up myself.

It really pisses me off when the fix doesn't work. You've invested the requisite time, and sometimes the replacement part itself is broken. It happens. Like this weekend. I replaced my starter motor with a remanufactured unit from Kragen. It was broken, too. Of course, I didn't discover this until the repair was completely finished. So now I have to remove this broken unit, take it back to the store, and get another one. What a frickin' PITA. It's going to take me another 1.5-2 hours to install this one and try all over again.

There was a time in my life when I would look forward to fixing things that were wrong with my car. It made me feel good about knowing I could fix it. Now, I get nothing but pissed off when my car breaks.

Of course, my wife's car has bad trailing arm bushings, too. I decided to do the work myself. I'm not looking forward to it. It seemed like the right thing to do to save money. But now, all I can think about is time. Weekends are so short as they are. And when there's 5-6 hours of work work to do, who wants to spend that plus another 5-6 hours working on a car?

I'd rather play hoops, spend time at the gym, catch up on sleep, movies and TV. The weeks are so long, and now the weekends are short, too.

I guess the lesson learned here is to be very deliberate about allowing crappy things to control my time and my life.