Some thoughts on Mozy...

So, I was curious to see whether Mozy (at least the Mac client, anyway) actually contained incremental, byte-level backup, such as rsync’s delta encoding algorithm. Mozy claims it does, but I wasn’t so sure. So, I conducted a very simplistic and unscientific test. I added 2.3 MB of pictures to a 100MB disk image, and Mozy backed up a total of 5.8MB (instead of the entire 100MB image file). Hard to say what the additional 2MB was for, since Mozy’s log files aren’t very informative.

Good News: Mozy Mac does seem to have some sort of delta-ecoding algorithm.

Bad News: It’s algorithm doesn’t seem especially efficient (especially comparing it to rsync, but again, its hard to tell without good logs)

After using Mozy’s Mac client for almost a year, here are some additional issued I’ve discovered with the perpetually beta client:

• Mozy’s uploads are slow, and the Mozy Configuration application caps its upload bandwidth at XXX. No way to allow unlimited ups.

• I’ve also noticed the Mozy background process is fairly unintelligent. I added a file to a backup folder, and it took Mozy a day and a restart to “see” it and actually back it up!

• Important: Mozy doesn’t mantain some very important Mac OS X meta-deta. For example, I had some bad permission problems after restoring some preference files a few weeks ago.
  

Back to Blogger!

Wow, a few years ago, I never thought I would actually come back to Blogger. As many may know, the Blogger situation not too long ago was pretty bleak. Blogger had been purchased by Google, and was sitting tight as one of the first blogging services while new and much better services launched. Blogger had become very outdated and stale, especially in comparison with the features offered by sites like Wordpress.com. However, a few months ago, Blogger rolled out version 2.0, complete with some pretty nifty new features that in many respects, actually have surpassed that of Wordpress. Now, if I wanted to host my own blog, I would unquestionably choose Wordpress. There is no doubt that it is more powerful in its capabilities than Blogger. However, its interesting to note a role reversal: now Wordpress.com (hosted Wordpress) is stale and Blogger has re-gained the crown, at least for me. Here are some of the new features that attracted me back to Blogger:

• Better theme support (allowing actual theme edits without paying)
• Better widget/script support (embedded javascript widgets and the like had problems on Wordpress)
• Google integration (with Docs, GrandCentral, AdSense, etc. - always a plus!)
• Post by email (to post while on the go from my iPhone - here's hoping Google creates a Blogger iPhone app!)
• Custom domain support (to use my fancy domain name, without ads or a titlebar)

It would be fantastic if everything could be perfect, but things never are. Right? Just in the few short areas I've been using Blogger, I've noticed some room for improvement - mostly within the "create a post" editor. For example, it would be nice to have some more formatting options (underline) and multiple levels for bullets. However, these can be accomplished with HTML code.

Note: I'm in the process of moving posts from my Wordpress.com hosted blog to this new Blogger blog, so things may be unstable for the next few days and all posts may not be available.