Mozy is a backup service that I first wrote about last August. It generated some interesting comments but so far I’ve been pretty happy with it. It just sits down there in the tray and does its job once a week. The restore I tried out even worked.
I received an email newsletter this week announcing some updates and changes. As some may recall, that was one of the catches to the free version — you’d get newsletters with ads. I think this is the second newsletter I’ve received since August and one of the announcements is that there won’t be anymore 3rd party ads in the newsletters. Can’t beef about that.
The other changes are much more exciting. For instance, how about the “in Windows restores” for nifty? Just right-click on a folder that you’ve backed up and you’ll see a new menu option. Select that and you’ll get an explorer window listing the backed up contents of that folder.
I just noticed that there’s another way to get to the same thing — directly via “My Computer”. In the “Other” list I have a pseudo-folder called “Mozy Remote Backup”. Drilling into that again 
shows what’s been backed up and restores are just a right-click away. I like the “Restore to…” option. Very handy to grab an old backup without overlaying the current stuff. Comparing documents, for instance.
Other big news? Users are no longer limited to the number of restores. In other words, restores are unlimited.
From the newsletter:
The rationale behind these changes are simple. Restoring from the web is nice, and sometimes is all you can get to if you are away from your PC, but in-Windows restore is just much easier most of the time. The unlimited restores is something we’ve been meaning to do for a while. We initially restricted it because we were concerned about abuse, but after millions of backups and restores, this does not seem to be an issue. And as for the removal of 3rd party ads from the newsletter – well, it turns out people really like to upgrade to MozyPlus, so advertising doesn’t need to be part of our business, and frankly – it’s kind of a pain for us to keep up with. We’re much happier just providing a nice backup service instead of chasing down sponsors.
Well said!
This is one of the apps that I’ve written about in the past and continue to use. It soothes my inner (anal-retentive) geek to know that my data is backed up off-site.
[Disclaimer: All Mozy links in this article are referral links. They'll cost you nothing but gain me a bit more free storage should you sign up. Big THANKS to those of you that clicked the links in the past!]
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December 14th, 2006 
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