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.
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{ 37 comments… read them below or add one }
You cannot comment on a product without comparisons. Mozy is a pretty good service, however, there are some much better online backup services / software. Mozy is recently acquired by EMC, so the cheap service probably will go away as EMC never sells cheap stuff. For other online backup service review, please visit:
http://backupreview.googlepages.com/default.html
Mozy’s online backup service is not without its problems – see defensive computing analyst Michael Horowitz’s article on Cnet, or this backup software review which explains why some of Mozy’s small print could result in you losing your data!
On the surface, Mozy seems great. Simple, minimal configuration, offsite backup with unlimited storage (and no bandwidth charges) for a low price. That it where the greatness ends. It was only after using three months of service that I realized its pitfalls. If you do any of the following, Mozy thinks you are adding another computer to your account, makes you pay double, and begin your backup from scratch again:
- uninstall the client
- reinstall the client
- reinstall your OS
- get a new computer and transfer your old computers data to it
- have a hardware failure
- have a software problem
It takes FOREVER to upload. I ran my computer 24hrs a day for two months (over a 1T) and had only backed up 60GB of my 180GB of data. The mac client has some issues and even though my client said I had uploaded over 100GB, Mozy.com only had 60GB. I had to uninstall and reinstall the client because the auto update feature wasn’t working and it restarted my backup from scratch! 2 months of uploads gone! I then got a new computer, and used USB to transfer all of my data from my old computer to the new. Mozy claims that when you get a new computer you have to use Mozy to transfer your data to it. Unfortunately, this means that both your old and new computer are out of commission for weeks on end, instead of using USB which for me only takes 1 hour. They claim that this is the way their service is designed to work and they have no plans to change. So, in other words, if you never buy another computer, never have a harddrive failure, a software problem, never want to reinstall your OS, and never actually need your data to be backed up, then Mozy is great. But then again, isn’t that the point of Mozy?
Thanks for your feedback, Sarah. My experience has been very similar with them.
Why not try literally any other online backup product before writing this review?
Mozy is slow (resource heave – check your resource monitor when it is running) and slows down other active software. Mozy has a very low default retention to roll period (only thirty days and most techs will recommend between 365 days and seven years)
Mozy need to be continually reloaded after restore (if you want to stay on the free price plan) because the 2 gig limit is a total of transfer (both up and down) whereas most providers base this on storage only.
Go with just about anyone else (free or paid) for a trial and you will not go back to mozzy. I know this because i moved to mozy from a super provider because i incorrectly read the toc’s and then moved to another service when i saw waht mozy realy is. The before and after alternatives wiped mozy.
Just in case you think I have a vested interest I will list a selection (rathen than one) of superior options.
ibackup.com
http://www.backup.com
http://www.backupanytime.com
http://www.carbonite.com
perfectbackup.co.uk
I agree with the above posts. I tried Mozy for 2 weeks and it failed continuously. Firstly it couldn’t contact it’s own servers for a full day, then 2 weeks later backups started failing. I checked the mozy log file and it was complaining about hash fails and backend problems, in other words the problem was again at their end!
I am now actively seeking to get my money back from these guys. Backup is meant to be error free and reliable, and Mozy is far from either. I am writing this comment in the hope that someone like me who is evaluating Mozy steers well clear of it!
Rusty
Ok check it out. I tried mozy and it worked great. The only thing I could see that would be a problem is if you have a slow upload speed and if your system does not have the proper specs to expect to run more than one process and the OS. I also tried mozy pro. It works great for my small business. Mozy does only keep the data for 30 days but from what there support told me it is because they are not an archival service. Also lets look at this for a second. You are complaining that mozy use your resources. Ok well I want a backup but I don’t want it to do anything until the backup is supposed to run. Well that is ok if you want to do a full backup every night but mozy does an incremental backup. So it needs to kind know what happens to the files to figure out the incremental backup. Really you should learn more about backups before you post. Oh yeah I just tried changing my machine with mozy. I emailed support and then they told me “With the mozy software you will just need to make sure that the files are restored to your new machine then email me back and I will send you a file that will make it so you do not have to reload all your data” and guess what he was right. It worked. All 50 GB is still on the server. Mozy has been great for me, and at 4.95/month for unlimited storage which really is unlimited. I tried other software’s and they have much more problems then I had with mozy. The only knock I have on the mozy software is that sometimes my backup does not run and it says connection error 3. I really think you should try out mozy. But stay away fro, ibackup. If you read there fine print they keep the file for 30 days then they can be deleted. Which is weird cause there front page says they will keep your file until you delete them. huh. So really online backups are not easy to do just cause of the limit on your connection speed but I found mozy worked the best for me.
My experience with Mozy was terrible.
1. during backup, my PC froze up 10 times in a row, regardless of setting ‘faster computer’ or ‘faster backup’. Reboot required every time.
2. no response from Email Support after 3 days.
3. no response at all from Online Chat Support.
Good thing I didn’t commit to 1 or 2-year plan, or I would have lost more than $5.
First of all, read glowing reviews on the web about Mozy with a high level of skepticism. Mozy’s marketing department is certainly good at seeding the web with positive “reviews” about themselves. I tried using Mozy’s $5 monthly plan for about six months and finally gave up.
Initially it seemed everything was going well with backing up 180 Gigs of files from my external hard drive. It took about three months of leaving my computer on overnight to get all the files backed up. But I figured that was a one time deal, and from here on I would only need to back up any new files.
But then one day Mozy software indicates that no files have been backed up. After numerous less than helpful and short one or two sentenced e-mail replies from Mozy support, I got an answer (though I must say, Mozy support did respond to my questions in 24-28 hours).
If you have an external harddrive, and if you disconnect it from your computer for any reason, Mozy will immediately mark all your backed up files for deletion in 30 days. Even if you connect the external drive back to the computer, you’ll still have to back up all the files from scratch since those original files will be deleted no matter what. This means I have to spend another three months backing up all my files all over again.
I would avoid Mozy if your goal is to back up an external hard drive. I wish their policy about this would have been more clearly explained on their website.
If it hadn’t been for that, I would not have minded the slow upload times – even if it took three months, and probably would have continued to use their service.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Maybe it’s just me but 3 months?! That seems like a ridiculously long time – what if your hard drive fails a month into the backup?
I’ve been using Mozy for nearly six months and I’ve been pleased with it. The initial backup did occur in starts and stops, but didn’t take significantly long. Best of all, I like being able to see what files are being updated each night — provides some reassurance that they are adding the correct material. Hopefully I’ll never have to verify the retrieval option….
arah said,
“April 23, 2008 @ 1:54 pm
…
If you do any of the following, Mozy thinks you are adding another computer to your account, makes you pay double, and begin your backup from scratch again:
- uninstall the client
- reinstall the client
- reinstall your OS
- get a new computer and transfer your old computers data to it
- have a hardware failure
- have a software problem
…”
It’s true.. I had my C drive fail however I was still able to transfer the data off of it a new drive (the failure killed windows, but not the data). However Mozy thought I had a new computer… luckily using a windows registry/hive reader I was able to get the old machine ID code out of the mozy entry in the registry and overwite the code that was put in my new drive’s registry when I reinstalled the client, and everything was good then.
“It takes FOREVER to upload. I ran my computer 24hrs a day for two months (over a 1T) and had only backed up 60GB of my 180GB of data. ”
Pretty much, when I first signed up I had something like.. 30? gigs? maybe 50? anyway, that took 1 full month of running non stop.
“Hosian Balderez said,
May 6, 2008 @ 10:27 am
…
Mozy has a very low default retention to roll period (only thirty days and most techs will recommend between 365 days and seven years)”
Why would you want a backup service to retain files you’ve deleted for 7 yrs??? It only deletes backup 1 month after you’ve deleted them off of your computer.
Anyway, the main issue I’ve having is now it takes about 2+ hours just to ’scan files’ and ‘analyzing backup sets’ and I believe it also ‘reciprocating splines’..and I should mention that’s 2 hours of hardcore drive thrashing, I’m concerned it’s going to burn out any day now. Also I find that during the day outside of backup times it’s doing thousands of i/o operations to my hd.. But hey.. it’s also only $5 a month.. and for people using the free 2 gig service, well you get what you pay for.
When we were working out our product we tried out mozy and it did work but the restore process was slow and limited at best. We looked at everything and went with rsync. It seemed to be faster than mozy and restore could be done as soon as needed it. You also had control over the deleted files issue that mozy seemed to have had.
Rsync is not as good of business model because of the open source nature of it and the fact that we did not get control over the client however I think this is about giving customers what they need not reminding them to pay up everything they turn on their computers
Anyway if you have not tried rsync it would be worth doing so. If you ping me on the ping box on our website I would be happy to let you try it without paying.
I love Mozy. I works just fine for me. I have it running on two PC’s error free. It did take a long time to do the initial backup, but then it just looked for changes.
For those who are having problems, maybe it is you or your setup… I mean if I use the same software as you do and it works for me, you would be the logicial problem.
Mozy is useless when you need it.
I’ve been using mozy for the last year.
Backups are smooth but slow. The personal account limits your bandwith to 2 Mbps. But, after the first backup that takes days, the differential backups are quite ok.
The real problem is when you want your data back. Living outside the US, they will not ship me the (really overpriced) DVD and a full restore will take 8 days because of their bandwidth limitation (I have a 10 Mbps, high quality fiber connection).
Also, the client will not resume an interrupted restore if you need do switch off or move your laptop, or you have connectivity problems.
You need to go through a very painful process of creating archives on their web site and use a download manager to do the downloads.
In all this, their tech support is useless. They will not suggest a procedure or a software to use, but only generically mention an pre-cooked response where they suggest the download manager as a possibility.
Stay away from mozy! It gives a fake sense of confidence.
Sure, my initial backup took about a month, but once that seed finished, the backups were quick and painless. I’ve been happy with Mozy so far. I did run into the issue with reinstalling my OS and having to re-seed the backup (I wasn’t aware that you could retain the data, will have to check that out again). But for $50 a year, I think it’s a pretty reliable service. I was saved last night after my data HDD died on me and I lost 4 years worth of photos. I was able to log into the Mozy website, set up a restore and download all the photos back onto my new drive. For that reason, the pluses outweigh the minuses. As for the other services, I’ve done my research and I haven’t been able to find any single service that beats Mozy in price and features. I was referred to JungleDisk which uses Amazon’s backup service, but their price was too high. Carbonite seems to have the same quirks as Mozy and no real price advantage. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I’m happy with Mozy for now.
hi all,
why not just buy a usb drive, keep it in a safe place, and do a back up once a week or so ?
all these sites just tell you you need something.. but you really don’t..
I tried both Mozy and Carbonite but ultimately I ended up staying with Carbonite. As mentioned already, both services have their quirks and neither one is perfect.
For me, I went with the one that was the least expensive and provided the least headaches – and that was Carbonite. I had resource issues when using Mozy but with Carbonite it worked flawlessly in the background without me having to change any settings. I literally installed it and it “just worked.”
To be honest though, both Mozy and Carbonite are great services for what you pay for.
Travis
BestOnlineStorage.com
Mozy is a disaster!!
This is my experience:
- It worked as it should for a few days. Then it started identifying large amounts of data that needed to be backed up which made no sense since I hadn’t added that much data – I mean 120GBs or 67GBs. It’s just impossible that I added that much data.
- At the end of every back up it would get to 100%, stay there for 24 hours and then say “connection lost”. EVERY TIME
- The support is DREADFUL. You’ll be better off asking a brick for assistance. You detail the problem, they repeat it back to you and then ask you for more details that you’ve already submitted.
- I called their headoffice…spoke to 2nd level support who was more helpful but ultimately the product just doesn’t work as the problems have persisted
- They automatically renew your contract. You contact them to cancel this. Guess what….no response! Yes, they don’t respond to you when you say you don’t want their ineffective service.
- I tried to excuse Mozy by trying yo reconfig the set up so that it wouldn’t have to think about what its doing. The software crashed.
- Oh…by the way, my case number is UHC-643999. I’ve seen people who have blogs who have got responses from Mozy. I paid for a year so why not give this a try…nothing else worked.
- I ended up buying a new Lacie hard drive. It gives you a year of free Carbonite back up. I’ll be going with that and asking Amex to refund the money I’ve wasted on Mozy.
Final conclusion of this Mozy Review
AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!! I really hope that this helps someone else avoid the problems I have had.
I went with mozy to first backup about 300gb of pics and vids from my still camera & then about another 1tb of other files.
The upload speed is limited by the program NOT YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION! I am getting on average 4gb uploaded per 24 hours. The program has an encoding bar (what its encoding I dont know) that sits and after it encodes a file it uploads at about 800Kb/s. It is not limited to cpu speed. The program just works slow.
I am not sure what will happen if I have to format the computer and restore it-if I can get the files back because its a different install or if will be charged again.
im having a horrible experience with mozy. 4 days not and they have to restored one file and are mostly trying to get me to spend $400 to get DVDs sent.
Still waiting for my files to be restored after a two day wait. What good is a backup service if you can’t restore your files when you need them.
What they offer is a false sense of security. Sure, the software shows you that your files are backed up and everything is fine. But pray you never need them.
Buy one of the external drives with automatic backup and have something that actually helps and works. I will update this when and if I ever get my files restored.
Tech support, by the way, comes by the way of India by people that almost know English. The live chat was a waste of time as you couldn’t understand what the person was saying and the followup emails were even worse.
They were great until they moved tech support to India. I’m switching because of that! I have ~12 networks and ~ 200G of data. not a big customer, but I REFUSE to deal with India!
R
Lee
Mozy for the Mac started off fine for me, but then did nothing for months (constant server error messages) so I dumped it and switched to Carbonite. So far, no problems with Carbonite.
A USB drive is an unreliable piece of flash drive that can die at any time leaving you without all your files. You can’t even begin to compare a USB drive to a server backup system like Mozy or others. It’s like saying why keep my money in the bank when I can store it in my mattress and hope no one robs me…
Mozy was OK until a year passed by, it got very slow. Then my friend told me about this site: http://www.MyOtherDrive.com. That site saved my digital life. (A lightning strike hit my house and all of my files would have been gone).
With MyOtherDrive I haven’t had any problems. With Mozy I had several computers to backup, which was costing me several subscriptions. When I switched to MyOtherDrive I could back up all of my computers with one subscription.
I thought Mozy had safely stored my files before I had my laptop reimaged. However, just to be really sure, I had also backed up all my files to my local external drive. Am I glad I did. I tried every single method I could to get Mozy to restore my files. I spent HOURS on the phone, online, and on email trying to get the Mozy technical support to help — horrible, horrible, horrible. No help — just pleasantries. I finally gave up after TWO WEEKS, and restored all my files from the external drive. What’s the point of using Mozy if I can’t restore my files? When I first subscribed to Mozy the tech support was super — but now it’s just bad. Forget Mozy.
Short and sweat: Mozy was great at first but soon became a bear and resource hog. The client is poorly coded but at least easy to set up. The price is good. However, it takes hours to start its first upload (says it is “preparing”), soaks up memory like a sponge and I almost never have a complete backup even though I run it each night. After a year or so of service, I just uninstalled the client (for the final time). I am trying out Backblaze and it was easier to setup than Mozy (which was Mozy’s selling point) and it runs immediately and uses very few system resources. It also is priced the same and has the ability to set your own passphrase so security is quite nice. Basically, it beats Mozy at Mozy’s own strengths and without Mozy’s weaknesses. I kept waiting for Mozy to correct its technical issues but after a year, it never did.
I liked Mozy two years ago when I signed on. $5 a month. Reasonable customer service. Took two weeks to back up maybe 50GB of info. I just got a new computer and now have to REBACKUP everything. I tried customer service. No phone number, only a chat screen and abysmal service. English is not their first language, so some of the grammar is incomprehensible. And what should have been a two minute chat took fourteen minutes while I waited and waited for simple responses. What should have just been a five minute chat was 25 minute and I’m not sure if my information is safe or not. Looking for something better.
Mozy stinks. I had trouble from the start – backups not going to their server, file retrieval failed. It never seemed to work properly. And when I contacted support, I was ignored. No response to my e-mails, no one answers their phone (kept getting voice mail). AVOID THEM. I’m trying Backblaze, hope they do a better job.
Mozy worked when I first installed it and then stopped working after about 6 months. Customer service was no help – it seemed I was bothering them. After several more months of effort and 8 months of no backups I asked for a refund and heard nothing back. Bad company and a bad product. Avoid them like the plague.
Mozy? Forget about it! It did not work at all. Moreover, the service is like a garbage can. The software did not work at all. After several times trying to upload my files (always getting ERROR 11 messages) I gave up and asked for my money back. They did not answered my messages and charged my credit card another $4.95, instead. Mozy is a piece of sh**!!
I signed up for the $5/month unlimited account about 6 months ago and have yet to have my initial backup complete successfully! I get mysterious connection errors and have to start over again. This past week I thought it was actually going to work but today I found that it had cancelled itself again (no error this time just a message “connecting to backup server…” that didn’t change after 20 minutes).
This is nuts. Mozy just doesn’t work properly. I’m tempted to just go buy an external 1TB drive, some hard-drive image software and set up a scheduled imaging job every night.
Mozy is easy to set up but it takes so long.I put 1.79 gb of pictures on there and it took 10 hours to retreve my data. But at least it’s free.
The setup was really easy, but beware of the default folders/files it selects for backup. It didn’t pick many files that I wanted backed up.
Upgraded to Windows 7. I had to clean install which meant a wipe of everything. Luckily I’ve been backing up my 16GB of shizz to Mozy.
It runs fine. I notice no performance issue. i’m using only one laptop. I easily informed MOzy of my new computer via their interface and voila – I can request the restore files be prepared and wait for the email. It took only about 20 minutes or so to arrive. So I started the download of the huge 3.5GB files they prepared.
Two flippin’ days ago!. One successfully completed. The others have gotten to about 40% or so – then no activity. Irestarted the client, my pc, refreshed the page, tried different network connection. As I’m writing this, I realize I am using a wireless connection. Maybe I should plug directly into the router.
My eyes are bleeding from staring at this frickin’ screen.
Hey thanks for all the revies guys and gals. Because of several of the posts here I think I’ll be steering clear of the Mozy home unlimited backup. I found this blog post because I searched for “Mozy unlimited backup – is it really unlimited?”. After reading the stories on how they artificially limit both upload and download speed, I’d say it’s a resounding NOT EVEN CLOSE for all intents and purposes. I’ll be checking into Carbonite back up and some others instead.
Regards, Joe from Detroit.