I have an aging PowerMac G5 which works great. So I'm looking for something that plays well with Mac OS/X.
Once upon a time, I used to do regular backups by burning DVDs. I'd then collect these up and put them in our storeroom. This is far enough from our apartment that it would take a pretty major disaster to make them unavailable.
Now that Time Machine has come along, I've become lazy about backups. Time Machine does a great job, restores actually work, and it seems to have no noticeable performance impact. The problem is that the backups are not offsite, so while it's a great solution to accidental deletion or a hard drive failure, it's not a solution to a bigger disaster like the building burning down.
What do do?
It seems obvious to me that the right way to do this is over the Internet. There seem to be a bunch of services out there which are Mac compatible, but which one?
I've seen positive mentions of Mozy and the pricing looks reasonable at $4.95 per month for "unlimited" data. There have been several positive reviews of it over the last few years, but some less positive ones too - such as these observations from Michael Horowitz at CNET.com. But I've seen comments reporting that it can be slow, that backups sometimes disappear from the Mozy servers and that restores are a pain.
Backblaze gets positive reports too. But the download says "Intel Macs only", so I'm out of luck.
IDrive, perhaps. 150GB of storage for $4.95/month isn't quite unlimited enough. I've around 50GB of photos in Aperture and 150GB of music. I'm sure the latter could be pruned (some of it is podcasts) but I don't like the idea of being limited to a fraction of the capacity of my hard drive.
A more general observation is that all these products appear to be Mac versions of what started out as a tool for Windows users. I don't have a problem with that in itself, but there's a difference in the kind of protection that I'm looking for an Internet-based backup to provide. Since I'm using Time Machine, I'm not looking for something to protect me from finger trouble or accidental deletions of files. Neither am I too concerned about my hard disk failing. I'm pretty well protected against both of those problems.
As a result, I'm probably looking for something simpler than many of these products.
What I want is something that will provide protection against disasters. An offsite copy of my Time Machine backup disk might not be a bad start. I'd also feel slightly happier if the solution didn't involve my data being shipped across the Atlantic, since I'm based in the UK.
Ideas, anyone?
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