Mozy Review: Is Mozy Online Backup Worth it? My Experience…

Update:: Maybe Mozy isn’t so great after all…

A little while back I signed up for Mozy - it’s an online backup service for your computer. My girlfriend had her laptop stolen earlier this year, which made me want to reevaluate my backup plan. After my hard drive spontaneously crashed last year I setup an external USB hard drive that I used in conjunction with Microsoft Synctoy, but that setup wouldn’t do me any good if the office burned down or the drive was stolen along with my computer.

I’ve seen readers on Digg and Lifehacker talk about custom remote backup setups, but I really didn’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a homegrown backup system. I wanted something easy, reliable, and automatic.

After reading about a few options, I came across an article on Techcrunch that mentioned Mozy securing a contract with GE. I figured if a company like GE trusts Mozy, I could too. I didn’t want to get setup with a company that is less known or could go out of business next week. And like last week’s debacle with Streamload demonstrates - these things do happen with smaller or relatively unknown startups.

So, on to my review of Mozy:

The nice thing about Mozy is that they offer a free subscription for anything less than 2GB of storage, so you can try them out and not have to pay anything for it. I knew right away that I would need to backup more than that so I went with the $5/mo. unlimited plan right from the start (I had about 30GB that I needed to backup - lots of photos). Practically speaking, unlimited is actually limited by your connection and the time it takes to complete - so yes, it’s unlimited, but the practical limit really depends on your internet connection’s upload speed.

Downloading an installing the program was pretty quick - the application is about 6MB.

Once you install it you get to set your encryption method (you can even choose your own). Then you “populate backup sets” - basically select everything you want backed up.

Then Mozy runs a test to determine your upload speed.

After which you select your preference for how fast Mozy should work. This selection determines the balance between how fast the backups run and how much bandwidth this will take up from your other tasks.

I actually had to go back and change this setting since the recommended 3/4 speed slowed down my network quite a bit (then again I’m on DSL, which has a relatively slow upload speed).

I reset this to about 1/4 to get my surfing back to normal and prevent the backups from impacting my workflow. As a result, it’s taking a rather long time to backup my 30 GB of files. This is probably due to the fact that I have my computer go into automatic standby after about 20 minutes of inactivity. If you have problems with this, you can either keep your computer running overnight and make sure it doesn’t go into standby or you can test higher upload speeds to make sure the process goes by quicker. Alternatively you can be more selective about the amount of data you actually need to have backed up (initially I just chose a ton of folders, some of which aren’t all that important).

After you set your preferences, the setup completes and Mozy starts running in the background.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for an automatic low-maintenance way to keep your files backed up remotely, Mozy is great option. You might have to play around with the settings initially to make sure your backup speed is sufficient without slowing down your computer. If you have a slow upload (like my DSL connection) and have less than 15-20GB to backup, Mozy will work just fine if you give it enough time to backup (at least a few weeks, maybe a month plus). If you have a faster connection and less than 50GB to backup, it should work just as well.

Mozy offers a completely free option for backing up to 2GB of data and a $5/month plan for unlimited backups. In my opinion - as someone who’s experienced hard drive failure - $5 per month for peace of mind is nothing compared with the giant pain of having to deal with lost files, photos, and important documents.

P.S. Mozy is also available for Macs as of this April.