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