Not so Safecopybackup

Last year I moved my offsite backup service From Mozy to Safecopybackup.com. In hindsight, a very very poor decision. Here's why:

1. While the client application appears to be tracking files in real time, and even tells you that backups are complete, they're not. A few files (and yes they were ones I wanted) I modified yesterday hadn't been backed up for three weeks.
2. Recovering data from a complete drive failure is nearly impossible because there is a limit of 200MB in the files that the web interface will allow you to zip and download.
3. Don't think that the Windows webDAV will allow you to get around this restriction; it collapses regularly and stops when files are "not found" on the server which happens frequently.
4. Files are sometimes restored with garbled file names.

So while you can see your data on their website, for all practical purposes it's not recoverable, unless you have a month and want to download files one at a time.

What I imagine most people look at when considering a backup service is the security of the store, the easy of setup and the simplicity and regularity with which files are saved. What I certainly didn't look at was what happens when you have a large volume of data to restore. Even when I had to restore the odd file here and there, something that bought me into direct contact with the restore function, the penny still didn't drop. Having spent almost a week restoring files piecemeal, it's not something I'm likely to forget any time soon.