Mozy backup

Carbonite or Mozy: Which Online Backup is Best?Many online backup services are available, but the two leaders in the industry are Carbonite and Mozy. In many ways they are quite similar, but each has its own strong points. Here is a comparison of their similarities and differences.Let's start with storage and pricing. Unlimited storage was once a feature of both Carbonite and Mozy. But in 2010, Mozy did away with its unlimited storage option. Mozy now sells 50 GB of storage for $5.99/month or 125 GB for $9.99/month. The cheaper option is limited to one computer while the larger storage allowance can be shared among three computers. Add $2/month to either plan for each additional 20 GB you want. You get one month free with a one-year commitment and three months free with a two-year plan.Carbonite still offers unlimited storage for a flat $59 per year; $109 for two years; or $139 for three years. Carbonite does not offer any free storage, just a 15-day free trial, while Mozy provides 2 GB free of charge indefinitely.Security is tight on both Carbonite and Mozy. Your data is encrypted locally using Blowfish encryption before it is transmitted over 128-bit SSL encrypted connections. The RAID-6 storage facilities are said to be 36 million times more reliable than a single hard drive.Online Backup Software: FeaturesYou can access Carbonite or Mozy via their respective proprietary client programs or via any Web browser. The latter option is typically used from public terminals, while the client software on your personal computer provides enhanced file management features.Carbonite has a very intuitive backup program which tags your files with small colored dots to show which ones have been backed up. Carbonite, by default, excludes certain types of files from online backup; these include video files, files larger than 4

GB, system and temp files. However, you can change Carbonite's settings to include any of these file types in a backup.The Mozy interface provides more granular control over what is backed up, and when, and seems to be preferred by power users for this reason. Mozy also offers "2x protection" which backs up files to a local hard drive of your choice while an online backup is going on. In fact, the local backup will finish up long before the online backup.Carbonite will not back up external hard drives. Mozy will, but there is one odd caveat. If an external hard drive is disconnected during a Mozy backup, its files stored on Mozy will be deleted after 30 days.Mozy also offers a DVD restoration option that Carbonite lacks. It could take days or weeks to restore several hundred gigabytes of data over an Internet connection. But Mozy will mail your backup files to you on DVDs so you can restore them faster.What About Customer Support?Carbonite has a US-based call center in Lewiston Maine, at which customers can reach a live human representative. I called and was connected to a polite rep in under a minute. Live chat is also available, as well as a Remote Assistance option, which enables a Carbonite rep to temporarily see your screen and control your computer. Home and Home Office customers can reach live support weekdays from 9am - 5pm (EST). Carbonite Small Business customers have expanded hours, from 8am - Midnight, every day.I found the customer support options for Mozy a bit lacking by comparison. Clicking the Support tab on the Mozy home page takes you to a page offering FAQs, an online knowledge base, video tutorials and a user forum. There was no obvious way to contact a human for phone, chat, or

Are deeper options within the program for customizing the backup schedule, changing the data sets to back up, throttling it during certain times of day to limit how much bandwidth it uses (an option we like), and so forth.One of MozyHome's unique features is called Mozy 2xProtect, which lets you schedule backups to a connected device, an external hard drive for example, in addition to online backup storage. Only the Windows app offers 2xProtect, but Mac users can use Time Machine to the same effect. The interface doesn't show you the active status of backups in progress or the health of your network, both of which SpiderOak does (letting you point the finger at your ISP for slow backups).If you right-click on any file on your computer, you see a Mozy option to add it to your backup. What you won't see, however, are options for sharing that file. MozyHome doesn't have any integrated features for sharing; the company says outright it is not a file-sharing program.Mozy offers a free syncing service, called Mozy Sync, which any MozyHome user can tack onto their account. You have to download a separate app to get it, but the Mozy Sync folder works like the Dropbox folder. Anything you put into that folder automatically appears on any other device with the same folder installed, though, again, you can't share this folder with other MozyHome users. You can also see your synced files from a central web dashboard that links with your MozyHome backup account.PerformanceTo evaluate its performance, we tested Mozy's backup processing and uploading speed by backing up two 100MB sets of files of mixed content types and sizes. We timed how long it took to complete the backups and averaged the results. We used PCMag's fast 100 Mbps (upload speed) corporate internet connection so that bandwidth wouldn't be a factor.MozyHome completed our upload test with a time of 2:43 (minutes:seconds), making it one of the slowest services we've tried. For comparison, Editors' Choice winners Acronis True Image ($49.99/Year at Acronis) and SOS Online Backup finished the upload clocked in at 0:51 and 1:17, respectively. Speed could factor into your choice of service if you have a lot of data to upload. On the other hand, you may not consider backup speed all that important, since it happens in the background and you only really care that the files make it to the cloud within a week or so. You can see how the whole set of online backup providers tested in the table below.The company does offer a physical drive service for bulk uploads called MozyShuttle, but only for Mozy Pro and Mozy Enterprise users.Web ClientSimilar to competitors, Mozy lets you log

Mozy is a great backup service that lets you synchronize, schedule backups and access files quickly. After you register with them, they will send you and email with the download link of Mozy client which works on both Windows and Mac OS. You will get 2GB of online space for free which you can use to backup your files quickly.Once you have installed Mozy client, the remote backup configuration wizard will open automatically, enter your username and password and click Next. Once you have logged in, they will ask for the type of encryption method to secure your data, select MozyHome’s 448-bit Blowfish key and click Next.It will then automatically scan your computer for important files that you may want to backup.You can unselect all checkbox if you don’t want to backup any of these folders and click Next. It will then test your bandwidth speed, click Next. In the next step you can configure the speed of Mozy. It is recommended to let it run at 3/4 speed(which is default).Once you have completed the configuration click Finish. That’s it and your client is now configured. The best thing about Mozy is that it backup all your file and folders in the background and only when your system is idle, you can also limit the bandwidth usage by enabling bandwidth throttle in options.If you want to backup your files quickly simply right-click that file or folder and select Add To MozyHome Backups. If you want to upload multiple files go to File System tab and select your file and folders from there.Once you have select the files and folder, click Save and leave the rest to Mozy.MozyHome is the most secure, stable, and easy to use backup client I have ever tried. If you want to increase the backup quota to unlimited, its only $5/month, which is worth it. Enjoy!

Mozy review: the restore horror story Mozy is an online backup service with an attractive pricing model. It competes with the likes or carbonite and offers a range of plans to suit any budget (even no budget). I have been using the MozyHome plan for the past year and today got to test what Mozy is like in disaster recovery mode.Two days ago I restarted Windows to apply some updates, and when I returned, the computer was stuck at the boot screen complaining about a missing system file. The following evening, when I returned from work, things were worse, the drive would no spin up, and was making metallic noises. As an aside, I must say they don't make hard drives like they used to. I have not had a single hard drive fail on me prior to year 2000, but in the past few years, I have had at least several fail.No matter, I figured this would be just an inconvenience -- after all, I thought ahead and I am paying for a backup service. A new hard drive and an OS install later, I was up and running and downloading the MozyHome client.The first bit of bad news came when I launched Mozy and it had none of my backup settings. Apparently these died with the drive, and Mozy was offering to start backing up my now empty documents folder. This gave me the first feeling of unease -- I feared Mozy would kick off backup and lose track of all the past data. I am still not sure whether this suspicion was well-founded, but the experience is certainly not the one you want to have when you are already feeling a tad on edge about the safety of your data.Next, I figured I would just do a full restore of C: drive. Mozy offered to either overwrite all existing files with those backed up, to rename the restored files, or cancel. No option to skip existing and only restore the missing files. Odd, seems like that would be an obvious feature. Still, I figured I had nothing to lose on the newly set up drive, and told Mozy to overwrite. And then the wait began.Mozy uses an extremely inefficient process to restore files. It does so one file at a time, first "Finding file on server...", a lengthy process that seems to take an amount of time proportional to the size of the file -- several seconds per file for tiny files, up to an hour for a large file. What it actually does during that time is not clear, but there are several problems with the approach: large numbers of small files take inordinate, ridiculous amount of time to restore. Imagine a directory with a thousand small files. Each file takes 10 seconds to be "found" on the server, that's 3 hours to restore what should take a minute to download. there is no prefetch while files are downloaded. Mozy, in its infinite wisdom saved and

PROS: MozyHome Online Backup is a simple way to backup data on your computer.CONS: This program that is easy to use and serves the purpose of backing up date well.OVERVIEW: The program is very light on system resources. You don’t have to be very tech savvy to use Mozy.The interface is easy to understand and use for all computer users.Mozy ReviewProgram: MozyHome Online Backup version 2.6.5.0Company: OS: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7Price: $5.99/month (50GB, 1 Year) [ Rating: 9 out of 10What It Does:MozyHome Online Backup is a full-featured online backup solution designed to not only protect the user’s data from hardware failure, but also for the user to be able to access their backed up data online from anywhere.Installation:The installation took about 4 minutes to complete and only used approximately 20MB worth of hard drive space, which is a negligible amount of space.Details:Before the installation was fully completed, I was required to login to my Mozy account.When I put in my login information, Mozy refused to connect.In order to get this to work, use your default web browser to login to Mozy, and after you’re logged in, from the Setup Wizard hit “create account”, and you’re done with the installation.After you sign in, MozyHome automatically scans your files, such as music, movies, pictures, documents, etc.With a free Mozy account, the user is only allowed 2GB worth of space, which is basically the same amount of space that you would get with an email account.Clearly, I won’t be able to backup/upload most of this, so we’ll go with the absolute bare minimum.I chose to backup and test “Browser Favorites” for the fact that it’s small, and easy enough to test.I could have chosen to backup “Photos”, but I’ll get the same end-results regardless of what’s backed up.The initial backup only took 2 minutes. I decided to repeat it shortly thereafter to see what the results were, and the second backup of the same files took less than 10 seconds to complete.I chose to backup and test “Browser Favorites” for the fact that it’s small, and easy enough to test.I could have chosen to backup “Photos”, but I’ll get the same end-results regardless of what’s backed up. A screenshoot of the backup process. The user is also able to pause the backup at any time, and is shown how many files are being backed up.MozyHome shows that the files were backed