For the past few months, I’ve been using Mozy as an online back-up solution. But after they changed their subscription rates to eliminate the unlimited storage option, I decided to immediately dump Mozy. In light of the changes, I wrote an overview of other online backup solutions for Associated Content, and now I’m wondering… what other services still offer an unlimited online backup?

Keep reading…

A couple months ago, I signed up for Mozy Home Online Backup. I was a bit skeptical at first that they could deliver an unlimited amount of storage for $4.99… but for a while they did.

Unfortunately, that all stopped with an e-mail I received on Tuesday…

“Thanks for being a valued Mozy subscriber. For the first time since 2006, we’re adjusting the price of our MozyHome service and wanted to give you a heads up. As part of this change, we’re replacing our MozyHome Unlimited backup plan and introducing the following tiered storage plans:

50 GB for $5.99 per month (includes backup for 1 computer)
125 GB for $9.99 per month (includes backup for up to 3 computers)

You may add additional computers (up to 5 in total) or 20 GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.”

Will I be using Mozy anymore? Nope. I cancelled my account this evening. I like the peace of mind of having an automatic online backup, but I also like having a reasonable price. My backup size has ballooned to over 425 gb. That would peg my cost at about $40/month and rising…

For the moment, let’s ignore the comparison between Mozy and other online backup providers. I can buy a 2tb external hard drive for less than $120. At that rate, I could buy an extra hard drive every 3 months and have a pretty high level of redundancy. Or, I could string some of them together in a raid array. I could probably also store one at a friends house and backup to it over the Internet.

So am I going to pay $40 a month to upload my files to Mozy? Absolutely not. Sorry. See ya later, Mozy.

So I recently re-installed Windows on my computer. I also recently posted that Mozy didn\’t appear to recognize my external hard drive as already being backed up after this re-install.

It turns out that there isn’t a problem after all… When I initially re-installed the computer and reloaded Mozy Home, it didn’t seem to recognize that there was already 300+gb of data backed up. The data was there; I could see it in the restore window. But it scanned my external hard drive and, I thought, started uploading all 300gb of data all over again. That would have taken forever!

A day later and partially through that initial re-upload, it magically sorted itself out. It uploaded some new data (~25gb of pictures) and then reported that it was done and all 350gb of data are safely backed up on the server. I need to look through the restore area over the weekend and check that everything is actually there and in one piece… but it seems for the moment like there isn’t a problem after all.

So, if you re-install Windows and keep files at the same location, Mozy will (hopefully) recognize that they are backed up and not send them all to the server again.

Maybe I did something wrong. But I don’t think so.  I’ve been using Mozy since the end of July, and this past week I’ve figured out one pretty significant problem with the system. When I re-installed Windows, I had to complete a new initial upload.

From time to time, I find it helps to re-install Windows, clean up the computer, and start from scratch. This gets rid of programs that have been partially uninstalled and left digital litter all over your registry. Although there’s software to try to do this type of clean up, I don’t think anything quite stands up to starting from a fresh slate. Keep reading…

From what I can tell? No.

Yesterday, I read an article on DPS about online backups, and one of the commenters recommended Crashplan over Mozy. Never used Crashplan, so I can’t comment. Reader said he had a horrible experience with Mozy, which is certainly possible, so I won’t comment.

But he also claimed that Mozy throttled your uploads to 10gb per day – in other words, Mozy artificially restricted you to uploading 10gb a day when you could easily upload more. The problem with this, of course, is that it takes much longer to upload an initial backup or any large change to your directory structure. This I can comment on, and from my experience it is patently untrue. Keep reading…

I woke up this morning, sat down at the computer, and was met with a pleasant surprise. Mozy had finally finished its initial backup.

Phew. 95,897 files and 287gb later. That wasn’t a lot…

It also didn’t take too incredibly long. I started the initial backup around midnight on July 31. It finished around midnight last night. That’s about 11 days, give or take, of constant transfer. There were also a few interruptions – due to an update that restarted my computer – which caused the backup to pause until I could log back in.

Now let’s see if it can keep up with the incremental back-ups on a daily basis…