The Halloween Report
Much more yard- and housework last weekend, but wrapped up Sunday early enough to take the dog through the neighborhood to check out the various Halloween decorations.
Didn't get anyone until almost 6:00, I was figuring it'd start up earlier to take advantage of the light and nice, warm afternoon. James was over for dinner, disappointed he didn't manage to scare any of kids. Compared, I guess to that first year, it again seemed light, but we went through five bags of candy, dispensing one piece at a time, in just about two-and-a-half hours.
Some fun costumes, the only one managed to get a photo of was the skunk family. When Cheyenne ran out to see what was going on, I cautioned them that she was looking for some payback.
And How It All Worked Out
So the data's as back as it's going to get. Mozy had it all and was able to get it; but, even still, it's tough to give them an "A" for this — the retrieval was way more lengthy and stressful than it needed to be.
The backup's accessed through a Web interface; that first weekend, nothing was loading. Rather than risk being a foul mood for Andy and Liz's visit, just waited to get into it all until they left. To Mozy's credit, they escalated my problem quickly and got me on the phone with a senior tech guy. His opinion, which I have no reason to doubt, is that server upgrades were giving everyone access problems; and, again, to their credit, only the user can access the data, so they couldn't go about restoring it for me, but could assure me it was all there (though my worry at that point was what "all" was). There were days of workarounds, afternoons spent on the phone mucking about with the account. And then suddenly it worked and I could order a drive shipped with everything.
Which was another week of waiting, but a tremendous relief when I saw all our photos, portfolio, and music. Some stuff was straightforward to re-file; some, like the iTunes library, turned out to be a little tricky; some, like fonts, haven't even really gotten into. Quicken data continued to elude me for a couple weeks; how Mozy restores via disk or the Web doesn't agree with the format; but some more support, some re-tooling and an alternate method of retrieval, and it worked. Problem was — and I suppose I have myself to blame — I can't figure out for the life of me where the current data file is. Best I've got is a manual backup from mid-August, which looks like it will have to do.
So I've stopped carrying around that retrieved data everywhere, set up a new backup drive in a different room, and everything's backing up to Mozy again. Still waiting to hear from the insurance company about the settlement.
Moral: can't outright recommend Mozy, but it did all work out. So whether them, or Carbonite, or some other thing, take a cold afternoon soon and get your computer backed up somewhere outside your house. This would've been so much worse if we hadn't made, what seems like now, that pretty small investment.
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