I’m making progress. Sort of.
I’ve pretty much given up on getting the Mozy backup/restore program to restore my entire photos directory. Every time I try, it runs for a bit and then displays a message saying it ran into some sort of problem communicating with Mozy’s servers — where all my files are hopefully stored.
As mentioned on Day 1, in early to mid January I copied all my data files (including the photos) to an external hard drive before installing Windows 7. As a matter of fact, I actually did this twice.
So I definitely have my files up through mid-January, and I’ve copied them back to the main drive. But my photos since then are still AWOL. Some of those have been copied to Google’s Picasa service and some to Facebook, but none of them are all in one place except on Mozy.
One thought is to try using the Mozy client program to download a smaller set of photos. Instead of the entire 10 years worth, just download the past six weeks worth of photos. For the most part, I do store my photos chronologically, and a chunk of what’s missing is C:\photos\2010\02. That’s easy to restore.
But not all my photos are stored that way. Two weeks ago, I went to the Farpoint convention. Those photos were in c:\photos\conventions\farpoint\2010. Other photos were stored in other locations.
The problem with restoring the photos piecemeal is that I have to remember all the various locations where they restored. It’s much easier to simply restore c:\photos.
In addition to the software which runs on your computer, Mozy also allows you to download your files from their web site. You log into their web site, go to the “Web Restore” section, and select the files you’d like to restore.
The first thing I tried on Sunday was restoring files via the program installed on my computer. It failed. The second thing I tried on Sunday was the web restore, it wouldn’t let me get as far as the screen where you select the files.
I tried letting the restore program run during the day Monday and when I came home, discovered that it had failed again. So I tried the Web Restore again, this time it worked and about 90 minutes later I received a notification that my files were ready for download. I started the download (3 files, totaling about 7 GB).
When I woke up Tuesday morning, the file downloads had failed. Ugh.
Before leaving for work on Tuesday, I managed to download two of the files and had started the third download running. When I came home, the final download had somehow became paused, but I was able to finish it.
So now I had all my photos in one place, right?
That would have been nice. After unpacking the archived files, I discovered that all the files since mid-January were missing from the restored file set! The client program was able to show the past six weeks worth of photos, but the web restore didn’t download them!
It appears that the Mozy application is backing up the files I’ve managed to restore from my local backup and that’s what the web restore gave me.
Taking a look at the Web Restore’s user-interface, I’ve discovered that you can tell it to restore the files to whatever condition they were in as of a certain date. I’ve also discovered that the last backup for which my photos were present was on Sunday, around 4pm.
I’ve started the Web Restore process running again. This time based on the backup from 4pm on Sunday.
Wish me luck.