My Backup Strategy Works!

I seem to have been having a spell of bad luck with hard drives and data loss recently. Less than two months after my 80 Gb Freecom portable hard drive died (to be replaced by a 320Gb Freecom ToughDrive), my 320Gb Western Digital MyBook has now also developed the Click Of Death. Drat.

Fortunately everything on the MyBook was backed up onto the ToughDrive (apart from the convenience of having a portable drive to take along with my laptop, this is one of the main reasons I keep all my important stuff on two separate drives). So, no problem there.

Then today, whilst sorting through some photos of Benny, I received a dialog box informing me that one of the files was corrupted! On closer inspection, what should have been a 3Mb file was instead weighing in at around 1Kb. Oh dear. I know that we have literally thousands of images of our first-born son, but even so, we cherish each one.

Well, you may remember that last spring I signed up to Mozy.com, and have since been diligently backing up my files (currently around 60Gb of precious data) to their servers on a regular basis. This minor loss of a file was my first chance to test their restore process, and I'm pleased to report that it worked swimmingly.

First, I right-clicked on the corrupt file, and selected "Restore Previous Version", which brought up the following window:

Note that two versions of the file have been backed up - the original 3Mb version on 8th August, followed by the corrupted version on 27th August. I have no idea what happened to it in the intervening time!

I right-clicked on the original version, and chose to overwrite the local copy. Mozy's servers then took about 30 seconds to find the file, and a similar time to download it.

Bam! File restored. Easy. Thanks, Mozy!