Mozy Online Backup: Simple, Automatic, Secure

I installed the Mozy backup client a while ago and never thought twice about it silently backing up my files. Fast forward to last week when I tried installing the Enigmail extension for Thunderbird. I originally installed Enigmail so that I could exchange encrypted emails with a Client who insisted on using GPG instead of S/MIME.

The Enigmail installation monkeyed around with lots of my Thunderbird settings including adding an extra link to download IMAP messages from the server that I had to click everytime that I wanted to read a message. After messing around with things for a few minutes, I decided to give up on Enigmail and ditch it in favor of FireGPG. However, even after uninstalling Enigmail the problems persisted. I probably could have figured out how to get everything back to normal, but my Thunderbird was almost unusable as it was and I just wanted my email program back to normal.

For a moment I pondered with dread what it would take to reinstall Thunderbird and redo all of the customization I had done to personalize the app over the last three years, when suddenly I realized that this was a perfect time to try out a restore from Mozy. Fortunately I had included my Thunderbird directory in my Mozy backup set, so I did a quick restore of my prefs.js file, and when I restarted Thunderbird, lo and behold, everything was back to normal. Here are the steps that I followed in case someone else needs to do the same thing.

1. I shutdown Thunderbird so that it wasn't running.
   
2. I opened the Mozy Virtual Drive in My Computer.
3. I navigated to the Mozilla Thunderbird profile directory. (C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\)
   
4. I right clicked on the profile folder and chose "Change Time..." to select yesterday's backup.
5. I right clicked on the "prefs.js" file and chose "Restore" to restore the old file over the new file.
6. I restarted Thunderbird and everything was back the way it should be.

Thanks a lot mozy! You saved my day.

Here is what some other people are saying about Mozy
Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal
Larry Armstrong, BusinessWeek

Lots and lots of tabs

One of the things that I love most about Firefox is tabbed browsing. Most day I have between 10-20 tabs open. I don't know that I'm quite what you would call a tabaholic (maybe I'm still in denial), but I definitely have a problem. Tab scrolling in Firefox 2 is utterly worthless in my opinion. I mean what's the point if I can't see all of my lovely tabs at once. I tried the Vertigo extension, but the vertical tabs just didn't do it for me. Then, today, during another one of my marathon development/working/surfing sessions I discovered by the How to Geek that clued me in to the Tab Mix Plus extension. Now I can have my tabs arranged in multiple rows so that I can have my tabs and see them too.