Dov Sugarman from Zoogmo answered some of the questions I posed in Friday’s writeup in his comment on the post, and also provided me some help with connecting to a backup partner and testing the backup and restore features.
For the beta period, at least, there’s a “dummy partner” set up to let people test the system. When I selected “MyZoogmo” as a backup partner, I got a dialog box asking me how much space I’d like to offer and telling me how much space was available for my files.
So I selected some files, and noticed that there isn’t a “next” button and that you have to go back to the “partners” window to back up or restore a file, but Dov assures me they’re going to fix that.
Anyway, it said the backup was running, but that no files were backed up. I’m not at all sure why. But Dov called this morning to walk me through backing up and restoring a single file (except that it became 4 files by the time it was backed up—don’t ask me how). And this time it worked.
Zoogmo compares the files in your backup location to the files on your hard drive and offers to restore the ones which are missing. Pretty clever, and also fairly simple.
Dov also assured me that you don’t have to set up port forwarding in order to host someone’s backup files, even if you have a router. That’s definitely a plus.
So we’ll see how it evolves.