[X4U] Mozy backup service referrals seem a nifty idea

[David Ledger]

>From: Daly Jessup <jessup at san.rr.com>
>I would like to hear from someone who is actually doing that. In my
>own case, transferring files over our local network is slow enough
>that I can't even imagine trying to regularly back up over the net to
>a remote computer. I would think that the effort would pretty much
>keep my computer busy a great deal of the time. But I've never seen
>it in action, so would love to hear someone else's experience with it.

It shouldn't affect other things running on the computer much. As 
it's limited to net upload speed it won't need many CPU cycles.

>From: Ed Gould <edgould1948 at comcast.net>
>I was thinking of doing this but then while I was talking to a friend
>he said even with DSL the upload speed is a lot lower than the
>download speed.
>It also depends (so I am told) by your provider so before signing up
>find how fast the upload speed is with your provider.

ISPs usually omit the 'A' and call their 'ADSL' services 'DSL'. The 
'A' stands for Asymmetric, which means that upload and download 
speeds differ. As most people download more than they upload, this is 
what most people would prefer. Increasing the upload speed would 
reduce the download speed. True DSL is very expensive and I believe 
the distance from exchange limits are more stringent.


>From: Tim Collier <tim_collier at bellsouth.net>
>I chose to back up my personal account.  It began the process and has given
>me an estimate of 10 days to perform this task.  Wow, that's super!  The
>only problem is that in 9 days, I'm leaving for Europe.

Perhaps you should leave the leave the backup until you go, then 
leave it running while you're in Europe - unless it's your laptop 
you're backing up of course.

>With CrashPlan running in the background as it says it will, network
>activity has slowed to a crawl.  Web pages that used to load in seconds now
>take as long as a minute (sometimes more) to display.  Sending and receiving
>Email is ridiculously slow and happily this will be the case for the 
>next 10 days

It shouldn't affect your web use by much at all. It will saturate 
your upload channel, but the only packets coming back should be 
acknowledgements, so your download channel should be lightly loaded. 
Your web use is the other way; the only competition should be the 
acknowledgement packets from your browser port getting into the 
upload stream. Email should also work well, except for sending, 
especially with large attachments.

The fact that it does impact you makes me wonder if Mozy grabs all 
upload capacity in some very unfriendly way and stops web page 
requests from getting out. It also shows that the long save time 
isn't due to a Mozy inbound limit. If you upload a large photo file 
to a web site, does that impact your browsing? If so, argue speeds 
with your ISP; if not, it looks less good for Mozy.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk