I have exper­i­mented with online backup solu­tions over the past few weeks.   I keep local back­ups, but the say­ing goes that any impor­tant dig­i­tal data should exist in three places or you should con­sider it nonex­is­tent.  In fire, flood, or EMP, the backup drive across the room is not going to help.

What I have

I have two main com­put­ers of impor­tance.  The first is what I’d con­sider my main server.  It holds the full music library.  It con­nects to the high-speed doc­u­ment scan­ner, so it holds all receipts, bills, and legal paper­work.  It runs Aper­ture, so con­tains all of my pho­tos.  Any older projects and web­sites that I do not actively need on the lap­top are there, too, although most of them are just local check­outs of Sub­ver­sion projects sit­ting out on the inter­net.  This backs up through cron jobs and shell scripts.  The cron job syn­chro­nizes (rsync, actu­ally) every­thing to a Buf­falo Ter­raS­ta­tion.  The man­ual shell script syn­chro­nizes (rsync over ssh, actu­ally) a disk image con­tain­ing the scans to a secret lit­tle shell account on the inter­net.  I have to admit, were I given a sec­ond chance to pick out a Net­work Attached Stor­age (NAS) device, I would not have picked the Ter­raS­ta­tion.  While it is ser­vice­able for use by a Mac, it is really not opti­mized for it.  I have writ­ten about the lim­i­ta­tions in the past, but the prac­ti­cal upshot is that you need to put a *.DMG disk image on the Ter­raS­ta­tion.  You attach to the net­work disk, then attach to the DMG sit­ting on that disk and store your files there.  Bleh!

The sec­ond com­puter is my lap­top, a Mac­Book Air.  I use it for day-to-day projects, but it mainly works as a win­dow into the other sys­tems I use, whether that is through a web browser, through an SSH con­nec­tion, or over a VNC remote con­trol ses­sion.  I do some cod­ing there, but all the code is checked in to a repos­i­tory (Sub­ver­sion at home, CVS at work).  I keep a few recent and favorite albums in iTunes as well as the pod­casts I have sub­scribed to.  It is my cal­en­dar and address book, and every­thing syncs to my iPhone.  It also houses a Win­dows 2000 vir­tual machine instance for when I need to do some spe­cific micro­con­troller work.  The backup here is just a Time Machine exter­nal disk that I need to remem­ber to plug in every so often.  (“It has been 20 days since you last backed up with Time Machine” is not uncom­mon.)  I really should be sync­ing to the Ter­raS­ta­tion NAS, but it’s nearly out of room, and if I am going to invest any more money in a NAS and NAS disks, I’m get­ting a Drobo instead.  (Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t just get an empty Drobo and move the TerraStation’s disks over there because the one takes old-school ATA disks and the other takes SATA.)

Enter Mozy

In com­par­ing online backup solu­tions, Mozy bub­bled to the top of my list.  Given that it is $5 per com­puter per month for unlim­ited stor­age, that is a very eas­ily bud­getable $10/month.  I have heard great things about Car­bonite, which offers com­pet­i­tive pric­ing to Mozy, but unfor­tu­nately I must dis­qual­ify them from my list.  Car­bonite only backs up inter­nal disks.  They will not back up exter­nal dri­ves.  Con­sid­er­ing my music library is on an exter­nal drive, Car­bonite is use­less to me.  (I sus­pect that an under­ly­ing sym­link might fool the Car­bonite client, but I did not inves­ti­gate this because it breaks the spirit of their usage rules.)

Mozy looked like the best deal and their Mac client had been out of beta for a while.  I signed up and tried it out.  I did not choose to back up my whole sys­tem, just some sub­di­rec­to­ries to test things out.  The ini­tial back­ups took for­ever and really bogged down the sys­tem.  I kind of expected this, though.  Between their doc­u­men­ta­tion, FAQs, and my under­stand­ing of upstream band­width, I was not too sur­prised.  The lap­top backup took about 3 or 4 days.  The server backup took a week.

What sur­prised me is that the sys­tem slow­downs con­tin­ued beyond the ini­tial backup.  Any time Mozy kicked in, the sys­tem would freeze for a minute, be usable for a minute, freeze for another minute, and so on.  The mouse would move, but you couldn’t click on any win­dows.  I would hit Cmd-Tab a few times to try to switch appli­ca­tions or Ctrl-Arrows to switch between Spaces and noth­ing would hap­pen until the machine unfroze and then there was a flurry of switch­ing win­dows and screens.  Even back­ups that should have been small, incre­men­tal changes — one or two small files changed — caused these freezes.  Pre­sum­ably, it was try­ing to fig­ure out which files really did change.  There were sev­eral times in which I wanted to throw the lap­top across the room.

This would not be bad if it hon­ored my “only back up at 4am” set­ting.  But it didn’t.  No mat­ter how many times I turned off the “back up after I’m away from the com­puter for 20 min­utes,” it kept get­ting set again.  It also kept reset­ting my 4am set­ting to the default time.  There were sev­eral times my lap­top would seem­ingly wake up on its own to back up — while in my bag!  I would pull my lap­top out, only to find a hot-to-the-touch machine that was not sleep­ing and with fans futilely spin­ning at max­i­mum speed but get­ting no air cir­cu­la­tion inside the zip­pered pouch.  There were also sev­eral times when the sys­tem would wedge for so long I was unsure whether it was frozen, so I used the 5-second-power-button trick to force a reboot.

Par­ti­tion? What Partition?

Yes­ter­day was yet another of the 5-second-power-button days.  My research brought me to Jun­gle Disk and I thought I would do one last Mozy backup before unin­stalling it and try­ing out Jun­gle Disk.  Backup.  Wedge.  Hard reboot.  Stuck at the Apple Logo screen with a spin­ning wait icon for min­utes.  Dozens of min­utes.  I won­der what’s wrong and reboot with Cmd-V to get the ver­bose startup mes­sages.  This is where all the great mes­sages about miss­ing sys­tem jour­nals and the inabil­ity to mount the root filesys­tem enter.

This is where you boot the OS X install disc, run Disk Util­ity, fix the issues, and reboot as if noth­ing hap­pened — except that did not work in this case.  Disk Util­ity could see the disk, but could not mount or oth­er­wise touch the par­ti­tion.  Drop­ping to the com­mand prompt to man­u­ally run fsck_hfs proved futile.  Attempts to use disku­til to force repairs, or to force removal and recre­ation of the jour­nal kicked back obtuse error mes­sages.  The pdisk par­ti­tion util­ity couldn’t even find the par­ti­tions.  Mount­ing it man­u­ally did not help, either.

This is the point where the author freaks out.  I had for­got­ten to attach my TimeMa­chine disk since Decem­ber 9th.  I had not con­fig­ured Mozy to back up my whole home direc­tory, only test pieces of it.  I had stuff I really did not want to lose.

I felt like I needed Tech­Tools, and in fact, Tech­Tools Pro­togo looked like it might use­ful then and in the future — but they only sell phys­i­cal DVDs in the mail and had no instant down­loads.  I had seen some men­tions of DiskWar­rior, but their site made it unclear if it would fix par­ti­tion tables or whether sim­ply undeleted miss­ing or bro­ken filesys­tems.  I then saw men­tion of Tech­Tools com­ing free with Apple­Care, and sure enough, once I logged into Apple sup­port I got a down­load link for my own copy of TechTools.

Boot­ing with Tech­Tools and run­ning all the tests showed that every­thing passed, which was odd and unex­pected.  I then booted to Disk Util­ity again and it was able to mount and check the par­ti­tion.  It appeared that Tech­Tools silently fixed what­ever par­ti­tion error was present.

I booted into the now-fixed par­ti­tion and every­thing looked fine.  I fig­ured this was a good time to do another Time Machine image (now 49 days since the last one).

Jun­gle Disk

So now I am try­ing Jun­gle Disk.  The pric­ing struc­ture is much less straight­for­ward and much more dif­fi­cult to bud­get.  It is $2 (per com­puter?) per month for a basic 5 gigs of stor­age.  Beyond the ini­tial 5GB, Ama­zon S3 stor­age prices apply: 15¢ per gig per month plus band­width costs.  This makes bud­get­ing com­plex, but for­tu­nately mis­cal­cu­la­tions are mea­sured only in dimes and quar­ters.  The lack of an unlim­ited option means back­ing up my whole music library will be a bit more expen­sive, but it is feel­ing more and more like “you get what you pay for” with remote backup.

The signup and instal­la­tion was smooth.  The backup is pro­ceed­ing as I type this, but I have to admit that it is run­ning as smoothly as expected.  There are no sys­tem slow­downs and the con­fig­u­ra­tion options (of which there are dozens more than Mozy) all seem to stick.

Restore will be another mat­ter.  Back­ups are only use­ful if the restore func­tion­al­ity works.  Mozy’s abil­ity to restore from either the client or the web was nice and worked as expected.  Given the pol­ish and smooth­ness of Jun­gle Disk, I expect sim­i­lar restora­tion suc­cess but, as I men­tioned above, that remains untested until the backup completes.

The Future

Assum­ing I run into no major snags in fin­ish­ing the backup and doing a test restore, I will be stick­ing to Jun­gle Disk on the lap­top.  The server is a big­ger question-mark.  Since I rarely sit in front of it, I don’t notice the Mozy slow­downs.  Jun­gle Disk will def­i­nitely be a much more expen­sive backup com­pared to Mozy.  There have been recent rumors of cloud stor­age and stream­ing your library in rela­tion to Apple’s LaLa buy­out.  If these turn out to be true, I may not even need to worry about back­ing that up.  So in sum­mary: Jun­gle Disk on the lap­top.  The server sticks with Mozy until enough of the Apple/LaLa sit­u­a­tion is known to make a change.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. Online Backup Redux
2. Online Backup?
3. Moral Dilem­mas Abound
4. WWDC
5. The Great Music Purge of 2006

Tagged as: apple, applecare, backup, diskwarrior, jungledisk, mac, mozy, osx, partition, techtool