Mozy and FreeZip
About a month ago I accidentally deleted 25 photos that I’d taken
at our 25th anniversary do. I felt horrified when I discovered this
after searching through my back-up CDs, and I feel embarrassed to
admit my error ... especially as I’d just given a talk encouraging
members to back-up all the info on their computers.
Fortunately I’d been backing up most of what’s on the computer’s
hard drive with mozy dot com … it’s a free online back-up service,
which amongst other things can store your Outlook Express emails
and address list, plus the “Favorites” list of your visited
websites.
I’ve written about all this before, but I thought I’d update you
with my experience of successfully using it to retrieve the
missing photos (80 MB in all). The recovery process by Mozy took
about 2-3 hours … you don’t have to have your computer on, while
Mozy does this, or you could do something else on your computer
while the restoration is going on.
You can then go to your designated email site to retrieve the
info, a few hours later. The info comes highly compressed as a
zip file, and you will need Winzip or Freezip to open it. My
friend Barry Swan told me about the latter, which is free
software you can download from here. I found this a bit tricky
to install (I had to “prod” the downloaded .exe file a few times
to complete the installation process). The key to using Freezip
is a right-sided mouse click on a zip file. This worked very
well for me, and I was able to unzip all 25 photos ... hurrah!
What I haven’t puzzled out is how to zip a file, despite
following the guidelines in the Freezip Help section – I may
have some faulty software, but the reviewer on the Freezip
download page had experienced problems using it also.
Mozy’s free use is limited to 2GB of storage, and I’ve noticed
that I’m already past the half-way mark. I’ve been on the FAQ, and
it seems that only the last 30 days’ worth of info is retrievable
or is stored ... so ideally you should do a back-up every month.
However our list of accessible info seems to go back over 3
months, so I’m not sure about all this, and whether or not I’ll
run out of free storage space in say about 6 months’ time. I’ll
let you know what happens.
By the way, in about 10 days' time I'll put the 25 photos onto
the main computer in our U3A Office, if anyone wishes to see them.
A small selection of reduced-sized photos is already on the home
page of our website ...you can click on one of these to see a
larger version. The smaller versions are .gif files (about 10 kb
in size), and the larger ones are .jpeg files, about 120 kb in size).
Smaller gif files load up much faster than larger jpeg ones, when you
go onto a web page. The larger ones look OK on a computer screen, but
would look very poor if you were to print them out. This applies
to most photos you’ll see on the internet (and helps preserve their
copyright).
