I’ve been trying to get Mozy backup to work for two months now. First of all, my harddrive is 300GB, and apparently this will take two weeks to backup over my connection. On top of that, there is no “start where you left off” feature, so anytime windows downloads an update and auto-restarts, I’m screwed. So, I can either turn that off, or never have a backup. Crap.

Let’s try plan B.

Went to Frye’s Electronics and picked up a Sabrent SATA 2.5″/3.5″ Hard Drive to USB 2.0 Docking Station, which comes with a one click backup button. Then I grabed a Hitachi Deskstar 500GB Sata HDD. Total cost: $99.00.

End goal is to have two or three HDD, once a week I’ll click the button and then grab the drive and toss it in my bag and take it to work and put it in my desk and swap it out with the drive in my desk and bring that one home. Rinse, wash, repeat. The other great thing about the dock is that it is scalable and useful. I can back up as many different computers and as much data as I want. I’m only limited by how many drives I want to buy.

So, a little trouble when trying to get the Hitachi drive to be recognized. I had to right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”. Then I clicked on “Storage” and clicked “Disk Management”; Immediately some dialog thingy popped up asking if I wanted to do such-and-such and I said yes (without snapping a screenshot, oops). This was the end result:

It sees this drive as “drive 5″. Cool. Whatever.

So, now I right click on the drive and select something about “format” or “partition” (idk, couldn’t get a screen-shot, there’s only three options, you’ll figure it out) and a dialog pops up. I captured some screen caps of what I did along the way. My choices were based on almost nothing other than gut instinct. We’ll see how it works out:

(Selected “no” here because I’m planning on this being assigned dynamically because I’ll theoretically be swapping multiple drives out here and I want them all to be seen as the same drive by the computer. So maybe I should have chosen “Z” or something, idk…)

At this point I closed out of the dialog assuming I was done. No Dice. When I went back in I saw it was formatting. After about 15 minutes it was only at 8%:

So, it’s going to take a while. About an hour later it’s done. Apparently bad call on the not assigning a drive letter. It’s ok though, I just right click on the drive partition and select “Change drive letter and path…”

And hey, check it out! There it is!

Now I can easily use the software and one button backup that comes with the sabrent docking station.

This step is going to take a while…

About an hour in…

Went to bed, woke up, and my computer had crashed (it does this at least once a week, another reason Mozy wasn’t working). So I checked the backup drive. Nope. Didn’t get everything. Got about half of everything. Trying again…