I've been using Mozy for over a year and uninstalled it a few days ago because the performance of my system decreased over time. In the end I wasn't able to use my computer for about 10 to 20 minutes after booting (until Mozy has configured/scanned) everything and even after that it remained sluggish.

A google search for "mozy performance" confirms that others have this problem as well and it hasn't been fixed since 2007.

While I would have recommended Mozy before I can't do so now. It took some time to find the cause for the slowdowns of my system. I haven't tested any alternatives yet but I think I'll try http://www.backblaze.com next as it has the same price tag.

Hi,

I suppose those Gigabyte of back-up datawill count against my internet provider data transfer limit ? or is the data compressed in some form as to reduce its weight on the pipeline ?

@Richard: Yea, I wouldn't see why it wouldn't count against your limit.

I've tried out Mozy and while it does work as described (sort of a "set it and forget it" model), there's an Achilles heal for me: the way it works with external drives. Mozy will work with external hard drives, but they need to be plugged in every so often. The way I understand it, when you unplug an external drive Mozy marks those files as deleted until you hook it back up again. As long as you plug it back in within 30 days, you're fine, but if you're like me an only hook up those drives every once in a while, you run the risk of losing all of those files. So if you'd leave a drive unplugged for 31 days and then plug it in and find it broken, you'll have lost that information. Since I used external drives for my long-term backup files, this is a showstopper for me.

If anyone has an alternate service that functions better with external drives, I'd be happy to learn of it! Elephant drive will maintain history forever, but costs $10/month. May be worth it for the peace of mind if it's as easy to use as Mozy. Any experiences with that?

Mozy, if you're listening, please come up with a better way to handle external drives!

@Tim: Carbonite is a competitor and has similar functionality. Perhaps they handle external drives differently.

They still have data transfer limits?? Is that on a cell phone?

@David: I looked it up and unfortunately it doesn't even work with external drives. From the Carbonite webpage:

"Does Carbonite back up external, networked or USB drives?
No. The current version of Carbonite backs up only the files that reside on permanent hard drives on your PC.

Check back soon for a Carbonite service plan that will allow you to back up your external drives."

I've been using Carbonite for a few years now. It has basically the same features as Mozy. It doesn't handle external drives at all as far as I know. One nice feature though is that you can access your backed up files from anywhere via a web interface. Handy if you need a file off your PC when you're at the office, for example.

I like to rebuild my PC every 6 months or so. If I use Mozy will it have to re-upload everything again because it's installed on a different OS build? That's how the software backup solution I use works. It's a pain but it only takes several hours as opposed to several days. I'd consider Mozy if I knew the answer to this.

Mozy has another Achilles heel as you thought, Jon.

When you have to wipe your OS, it won't necessarily restore to that new OS (since it's different). I had to get the external backup files, which took a long time to generate and to download.

Their software is pretty crap.

Also, you'll notice that if when you're right clicking or deleting files in Explorer, it's taking a long time? That's Mozy, or rather, Mozy's crap shell extensions. Disable them in ShelExView and your Explorer painful slowness goes away.

You ever want to change when your backups are scheduled? Load the control panel - it'll take forever since it needs to load all of your files (mine takes 5+ minutes, maybe more) and then since you're not running it in administrator mode, you have to press a button to do that, and it will load all of your files again. Not that you ever wanted to look at them.

In short, the software is pretty crap. Not a cool tool. I'm using it, but only because it's cheap.

Your backup is only as good as the outcome of a restore activity.

I used mozy for about a year - and was frustrated much of the time. Buggy software, upgrades that didn't work, capped bandwidth, and (worst of all) really poor customer service when I tried to get answers. Mozy is now officially Dead To Me.

I'm now a completely satisfied customer of Backblaze (www.backblaze.com). Same basic deal - $5/mo or $50/year I think - but it just works. No bandwidth cap so it gets that initial upload done much faster. And it just works.

It handles external drives differently too - it recognizes whether or not it's online (or if, in fact, the computer itself isn't online) and doesn't count that against the determination of whether or not a file should be considered 'deleted'. So it's only if a disk has been online for a month and a specific file has been deleted for a month that it deletes that file from the storage.

It also has a sort of mini time-machine type of logic built in so you can, for instance, restore a specific file from 3 weeks ago instead of the most current version of it, which is VERY handy.

And heavy-duty encryption (using your own key if you want) that gets applied to files before they're uploaded.

And it just works.

I did a more complete review on my blog - http://digitalcomposting.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/backblaze-my-offsite-backup-strategy/

mozy doesn't handle networked drives either, so if you have a NAS or something at home it'll fail.

I use crashplan instead. mac support, networked drives, decent backup speed and restores are easy.

Hello,
Daniel Larsson from SpiderOak Inc here. I would just like to inform you of our Online Backup, Sync, Storage, Access and Share Service at (https://spideroak.com)

With SpiderOak you get 2GB free for life Online Backup Plus our other services that lets you synchronize, share, storage and access data online in a 100% zero-knowledge environment.

SpiderOak is available for both Mac, Windows and Linux and offer the highest security and usability. Premium accounts are $10 per 100GB (unlimited up and downstream data) and we allow unlimited devices with one account!!

Try us out at htttps://spideroak.com/download and tell us what you think!

Hey Daniel...what's "htttps"? That's new one on me.

You might try DropBox (http://www.getdropbox.com/). Not only does it do backup beautifully, it enables sharing and sync and a host of other extremely useful features. We use it non-stop around my house and my work.

I have been using Carbonite for a month or two now and so far I like it. It took a LONG time for the initial backup -- two weeks or more if I remember right -- but now it handles new backups in a flash. It seemed like my computer ran a little slower when I had Carbonite working invisibly in the background so now I have it set to back up once a day and that seemed to do the trick.

$10 per 100GB per month? So, $100/mo to back up a 1TB drive?
That's what the drives cost. You're better off buying a new drive every month, backup to it at SATA speeds, then shipping it
offsite (eg. to a friend in another city) for storage. Or, ship it empty,
then use rsync over ssh for daily remote backups. This way, your data isn't lost when the company folds.

If you have a good internet connection, the slow uploads are absolutely the fault of Mozy. I am 20 megabit upstream on Fios and curiously noticed that my uploads never exceeded 1.3 megabits. Mozy confirmed that is their cap even if you have throttling disabled in the client. I also experience regular connection problems. I had over 300gb backed up with them but switched from pc to mac and it has to be reuploaded. After over 2 months its less than 25% done.

I currently use a combo of dropbox, jungle disk, and mozy but I think Mozy is going to have to go. The lack of linuz support kills me and whats the point if your files never even make it up.

Been using Mozy for about a year now after I got in on a hefty discount promo for two years and it definitely has good and bad elements.

GOOD:
- Unlimited backup seems to actually mean unlimited backup. I've uploaded over 400GB to their servers without complaint (which makes Mozy much more cost effective than Amazon S3).
- Automation works well, and you can make custom backup sets.
- When reinstalling Mozy software (I had to do this at one point) the system seems to check files against what's been uploaded to your account before trying to re-upload previously backed up files. Not sure if this would work with a complete reinstall of the OS.

BAD:
- Upload speeds capped - takes forever to do an initial backup. If you have lots of data it can take days or weeks to back everything up.
- Client software is slooooooow, especially when starting up configuration.

Trusting the cloud is tough, after all the stories of yahoo/google/etc data loss. What happens when this company goes out of business?

I've uploaded 10 gigs at 5 mbit today, and I think that's max speed of my university line... so any capping must be above that.

also, google for discount codes, there are plenty.

@brian - yup, that throttling was really annoying w/ Mozy. Backblaze runs as fast as you can shovel bits to it, so with my fast fios connection I had all my stuff up there reasonably quickly (days, not weeks, for several hundred megabytes.) Right now I've got close to a terabyte on Backblaze.

And yes, any plan that charges you by the megabyte is going to get expensive if, like me, you're trying to get hundreds of megs up there.

@arebelspy - Keep in mind that cloud backup should always be a _secondary_ backup. I'm still doing a local backup as well. But if my house burns down...

i tried mozy when they first appeared on the scene--more that five years ago, i think. got started with it by backing up selected folders. kind of forgot about it. checked back in a few months and there was nothing there. they never heard of me. and what really bugged me was their "oops, oh well" attitude.

my family and most friends are very private people--not at all the facebook, myspace type. i have no idea what happened to the photos that disappeared, but i do know that if they show up at some point online, my name is mudd.

A rare miss for Cool Tools - like many others I tried, then abandoned Mozy. CPU hogging, super-slow uploads, etc - and when it came time to recover some files I couldn't just mount a file system and copy them over - they came across as multi-part disk image files, which I then had to mount individually and copy files from - what the heck?

I'm MUCH happier with Jungle Disk now, and I think _that_ is a Cool Tool.

I've tried Mozy, CrashPlan, and Carbonite.

I'm happy w/ Mozy for their free account for my important home documents. I don't back up a lot of data to it.

Typically, ISPs are not as concerned about data upload usage (which is what you'd use when backing up your data).

Mozy definitely lets you browse your files online and you can select individual files to restore. They even do file versioning. When you log into your account on their website, you can browse your file revisions by date.

Also, with Mozy, you can throttle it's CPU usage. And depending on the size of the data store you have backed up with them, it can take a long time to generate the restore zip file. I like that there's also the option to restore via DVD.

I chose Carbonite to backup my work computer. They don't have a free plan, but I wanted to investigate an alternative service myself. I've also been happy with that. It seems pretty unobtrusive. I haven't yet had to restore files from Carbonite. The only restore option they seem to support is to install the client to your machine and do the restore through the client.

I set up CrashPlan as a secondary backup system between my friend's work and home computers. I've had mixed results. He just replaced his work computer and I can't get the two machines to see each other via CrashPlan. Their support and documentation are totally weak. I love the idea though and it made it really easy to transfer his data from his old work computer to his new one. But I can't recommend them wholeheartedly due to this unresolved problem I'm currently having.

I'm thinking of trying JungleDisk or BackBlaze when my Carbonite subscription year is up later this year.

Here's what I like about CrashPlan in a nutshell:

* Reciprocal backup to storage under the control of a friend, rather than to datacenter space leased by a company operating under a financial model I do not understand. If the friend is nearby, then it's also much easier to get ahold of the data for a bulk restore.

* Initial backups to a local hard drive can be continued remotely, eliminating the slow-startup penalty. I love this detail.

* Multiple destinations, for onsite and offsite backups

* Compression, de-duplication, and encryption, for small and secure archive files

* Block-level file copying, for efficient transport of large monolithic data like virtual machines

* Throttle-able CPU and bandwidth consumption

* Free for basic use, including all of the above. Cheap at one-time $60/seat to register, for data retention, scheduling, and continuous backup (15-minute intervals by default, daily in the free version). Server-only computers not being backed up themselves don't even need a license.

* Platform independent on the server and client, including Linux support. Supports 10.4 on the Mac, good for computers that don't have Time Machine.

I'm really pleased with it.

@Cooper and @Todd: JungleDisk (which is simply the interface app for using Amazon' S3 storage) worked fine for me. No problems. I only moved to Mozy because it was a lot cheaper, and unlimited.

I will check out BackBlaze.

Mozy is incredibly slow and their restore ("download this giant zip file") is atrocious.

CrashPlan is a better idea -- backup to an external drive and to a server; the content is encrypted, etc. etc.

I make local backups on my Mac using SuperDuper! to an external drive, and I use DropBox for sharing files and keeping my two computers in sync. But I wanted a big remote backup for extra protection. I finalized my search to Mozy and Backblaze, and wrote to both companies. Mozy ignored my first email, and when I sent it again, I got back a half-answer days later that basically pointed me to the website. By contrast, Backblaze answered my email within 2 days with a complete, professional answer, and when I sent them a follow-up, I got an equally professional reply. I chose them. I also very much like the fact that I can securely encrypt my data before it even leaves my computer, so that even if someone at Backblaze or their servers turns out to be a data snoop, they simply cannot access my data. I'm now on my third day of uploading my drives. They don't upload everything (the System, Applications, and Library folders, for instance, are excluded permanently - I don't know if that's for legal or storage reasons). So far, I'm happy with this choice, but I'm still in early days.

I have been using Diino free for 2 gig. They are ending that and are offering freeusers 100 Gig for 19.95 per year. The non special offer at www.diino.com is $49 per year. It is not the fastest, but the 19.95 price seems right for me.

Is this April Fool's Day? Mozy is not a Cool Tool. I used Mozy for three months and was never able to complete an upload. Every time I tried (even when I had selected less than 500mb of files), one of their galaxy of errors occurred. Note that less than half their errors are even documented online. The bandwidth cap on uploads makes it very difficult to complete uploads. I also concur that no matter what updates they put out, their client is junk.

On the plus side, I sent a support ticket with all of this in it, and they refunded my entire two year payment! So in my experience Mozy provides good customer service even though the client falls down.

I started out with Mozy, but it turned out to be unreliable. Access to the server would come and go, and I'd find that its attempts to make backups would continually fail for as much as days at a time. I got disgusted and finally ditched Mozy and went to Carbonite, which has been working flawlessly for the past year or more.

Wanted to add - that as a Mozy alternate, Jungledisk is STELLAR. I use it to auto-sync important docs on a daily basis. Note that due to Jungledisk using Amazon S3, it isn't cost-effective over 50-100GB stored, so I don't use it for full system backups.

Whether or not Mozy is the best choice, this is an excellent item for Cool Tools because A) it's made us all think about the need for offsite backup, B) it's made us aware that there are some viable low-cost options for same, and C) it's prompted a lot of informed discussion about what options are available and their pros and cons. Thanks again, KK!

Digging through the fine print for Mozy, Backblaze, Carbonite, and JungleDisk, it turns out that all of these services reserve the right to keep copies of your data even after you cancel your account. Once they've got it, they've got it, and the possibility of getting you to sign up again to retrieve data gives them incentive to keep it.
Worth thinking about, given that the encryption protecting your uploaded data now may become trivially easy to break in the not-too-distant future.

Mozy meh. Like everyone has said really slow and buggy.

My dropbox is great because you get the cloud backup but you also get it on all your machines so my machine at work has it and is a defacto offsite backup for my computer at home. Same with my laptop. Only problem with my drop box is if you share machines with a non computer literate partner they can muck things up by dragging stuff around and a corrupted file on one machine can mess up all machines. but overall much much faster and easier than mozy and so usable.

It's Mozy No to me after my laptop failed and I had trouble with their help folks who didn't help me get the old info onto my new laptop. Now trying Backblaze....and I'm planning on getting a Seagate Replica as an additional safety net.

My Options:

- Photos - Flickr (Pro Account - $25/year - unlimited photos/any size)
- Docs (PDFs/Presentations) - Google Docs (free - limited number of files/size) + Scribd (free - unlimited files - 200MB files)
- Docs (spreadsheets) - Google Docs
- Music - usually on my hard disk and iPhone (I don't see the need to hold or backup much music since it's everywhere in the internet, sites such as Pandora, Last.FM will stream anything that you want to hear, anytime since you are connected)
- Other Minor Files - Dropbox (2GB free)

A Mac-centric opinion: BackBlaze makes Mozy look like amateur hour. I worked with the Mozy developers for over a year, trying to refine their Mac betas, and in all that time, Mozy never really delivered. Carbonite simply didn't work. BackBlaze worked right out of the box, and has never even hiccuped. Case closed.

Psst - any geeks out there? Check out rsync.net and rsync --link-dest. Morlocks only, no eloi apply.

Tell 'em Cernan and Schmidt sent ya.

For everyone saying that S3 is too expensive, I have to ask, why do you think your data is being treated sanely at Mozy/Carbonite/etc? I can't find anything on their sites about how their internal storage is backed up, made redundant, etc. At least Amazon allows you to configure your stores to be globally redundant atop their already redundant infrastructure. I look at the all you eat backup plans as a race to the bottom, there is no way that you can sanely store, redundantly and with high availability, a TB of data for a customer for $50/year.

I have confidence in S3, as I have confidence that Amazon will be around in 10 years. And that because S3 is driven by Amazon's need to serve its primary business needs, it's going to be better engineered for redundancy and availability than most every other backup service.

Maybe a better approach would be store all your sensitive, highly critical stuff with a pay by the byte vendor like Amazon, then store all your crap like music and photos with other vendors, like Smugmug (uses S3) for photos, and ? for music.

When I had a machine crash recently, the restore of files from Mozy, such as Microsoft Outlook Express inbox and other Outlook Express folders was not correct. Granted, I have several large folders for saved items in Outlook, but they did not restore properly.

I also like that Amazon is working on export & import capabilities where you'll send them a drive for an initial import or (eventually, not available yet) presumably you'll be able to buy a drive from them loaded with your files.
One reason I haven't pushed this kind of backup (including the Reseller version of JungleDisk) for customers is that if I have a customer backing up all their scanned documents and they need those recovered, I may be looking at several hundred gigs of download (one specialist eye doctor is approaching a gig of photos of retinas by now). Sure most files are less urgent, but I suspect most restores don't have a way to specify which files are high-priority and which aren't.

Sorry, that should say that the medical practice is approaching a terabyte of photos of retinas.

I have been trying unsuccessfully for six months to get my 100GB+ of files from Mozy. I suffered a catastrophe and started attempting to restore... and I've been working on it since before Christmas. Still not completely restored. Their RESTORE functionality is abysmal. I was a fan while I was backing up till I had to actually USE their system and realized that I was hosed. DO NOT USE MOZY.

Carbonite is terrible, I was using it and thought everything was fine and had a hard drive problem and it turned out that Carbonite had not saved any of my files, their customer service definitely needs upgrading. Don't use it unless you just want to spend money for nothing!

Get a reliable hard drive back up that plugs into your USB port and does back ups, cost is more but you actually have your data saved and no problem with internet outage. You get what you pay for with an external had drive, on-line services only work when the internet does. If there is a problem, your luck to get you money back.

Do you value your data then don't use short cuts

Kind regards, gregor

One more vote against Mozy. I tried for a year to get it to work with my Mac but never completed a full backup, despite repeated email exchanges with the support folks. Heard about BackBlaze, gave it a try, and it has worked flawlessly from the beginning. Love the interface and performance, and the price is right. Mozy really should be removed from Cool Tools.

ealmasy writes: "it turns out that all of these services reserve the right to keep copies of your data even after you cancel your account."

This is mostly a legal artifact of how storage works. If you delete a file on a disk, the bits are mostly all still there, they're just marked as overwritable. Google, Yahoo, and many other internet companies have the same things written in their service agreements. Unless the backup provider switches to a system where all bits belonging to a file are overwritten several times with random bits, they're not fully deleting your files; they could still be partially recovered. Furthermore, any backups they have of your files would need to be deleted, and for offline backups that's certainly cost-prohibitive (although i'm guessing that these services do not use any sort of offline backup).

I love, love, love dropbox. If you haven't seen it lately check it out again.

-Access from any computer or Internet accessible device
-Syncs files to all computers
-No more emailing yourself a file
-iPhone app which has saved me several times, pull up any pict
-No need to remember to back up to a local drive
-Files are local and internet accessible
-No performance hit while it is backing up plus it's pretty speedy backing up

Did I mention I love dropbox?!