Since the beginning of June, have no longer had to worry about backing up image files.  The backup has been automatic, secure, and off-site.  Although not exactly fast.

In late May of this year a neighbor who has many gigabytes of photos and videos on his home PC had spoke of a Walt Mossberg column he read last December in the Wall Street Journal which compared two off-site data backup & storage services, Mozy and Carbonite.  Walt's endoresment of Mozy got my neighbor to try it earlier this year.  And although he said it took about a month to complete the initial backup, once it was done he knew he wouldn't need to go through all the motions for backup that I was doing.

After buying and reading Peter Krogh's book "The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management For Photographers" last summer I began the process outlined in his book of filing and storing images in folders no bigger than what a DVD could hold, making DVDs every time I acquired new images, and then carting the DVDs off to a safety deposit box at a local bank branch.  Although this work flow does provide for safely backed up files, it was too many additional steps and required too much extra time.

With Mozy, however, this old, tiresome process is now a thing of the past.  

Mozy is easy; it backs up whatever files or file types you specify whenever your machine is idle.  It is also cheap (i.e., about $5 per month for an unlimited amount of storage).  At present have almost 100 GB backed up which includes all my digital image files, the contents of a 30 GB iPod, plus other files.  But in addition to easy and cheap it is also safe.  Every file is safely stored off-site thousands of miles away (at least so I think).  Restoring files is as simple as selecting the file(s) to restore from the integrated user interface or request DVD copies by mail.

The only negative experience to date was the time (about a month) it took to complete the initial backup.  Although the downstream service from our internet access provider (a cable TV company) arrives at a whopping 5 giga whizzes per second, the upstream speed crawls at an unbelievably slow 512k per day (it seems).  Mind you this upstream speed is ordinarily no problem, but it certainly slows down the backup process.  And while this speed is not the fault of Mozy, it does have an impact (albeit a small one once the intial backup is complete).

Without question, though, can say am a happy and satisfied user of Mozy.  And glad to be rid of a process where I had numerous steps to complete to ensure backups were made and taken off-site.