Mozy Online Backup Review
Overall Rating
What we have with Mozy, is an online backup, storage, and file sharing suite that epitomizes what that whole web 2.0 movement was all about: minimalist and very simple and easy to use interfaces and approaches, and extremely consistent high quality service. And in the end, you have a product and service that’s highly intuitive and reliable, which is why we highly recommend the premium service.
Product Philosophy
Mozy’s actually owned by a Fortune 500 company, EMC Corporation, which has offices all over the world, including the UK, China, and other countries. The product philosophy’s pithy enough: set it, forget about it, depend on it. This relatively simple statement, though, implies a number of pretty sophisticated assumptions: the service is secure and safe, and that the software and technologies involved are very smart (i.e. so smart that you can just leave them, and forget about them).
Features
In order to interact with the Mozy cloud, you’ll have to install a desktop app, which is available for both the Mac and Windows based computers. Installation runs simply enough, and you’ll find that the steps involved are really self explanatory. There weren’t any surprises or anything remarkable about the installation process.
After installing, that “setting it” part (you know, just before you “forget it”) takes place; you elect for all of the folders (well those folders within your storage limit; if you’re on the free service, you’re limited to 2 GB; see the Price section for more details) that you want to have backed up on an on-going basis.
After you set up those folders, you’re set, and the backing up starts immediately. Quick and easy indeed.
What we liked about Mozy is that we did indeed forget about it. We had to reboot our system for another installation, and with our short attention spans, forgot what we were doing by the time our system came back online. It’s so good at what it does that you literally won’t notice it running in the background. If it weren’t for the progress reports and status pop-ups, we would’ve forgotten that gigs and gigs of our data were being uploaded to the Mozy cloud.
After the desktop utilities through scanning and backing up your files, what happens next is, you’re going to have to do a bit of management about your backups and online storage. The features about this are incredibly self explanatory, and since they’re really just a few basic options, we’re just going to briefly list what’s possible.
First up: you can set up your backups to either happen automatically or only on a schedule. The default is to happen automatically, so if you prefer this not to be the case, you’ll have manually get into the app to adjust this, and then set up a schedule for the backups to run. Some of our offices run backups only at the end of every business day, while other departments run backups once, or twice a week. All depends on how active you are with your data; it’s a personal preference.
Second, there’s bandwidth throttling; in other words, you can cap the absolute amount of your total available bandwidth by setting the value manually. This is good if you’ve got other bandwidth intensive things going on, like if you’re podcasting live, or if you’re downloading a huge file that can’t be taken down in pieces.
And then finally, there are the restore options. These are pretty standard and straight forward, with options ranging from downloading a restoration file, to even ordering a DVD copy of your files be sent to you via FedEx.
A nice little feature to the premium services (and something you’re seeing a lot more with these online backup and storage suites) is version history; this is particularly helpful and useful when it comes to larger document projects. Another feature that falls under File Support is the service’s ability to backup files that are in use, open or otherwise locked up; we get this all the time with email and calendar client files, browser plug-ins, etc.
File Sharing
While Mozy is probably the best backup service we’ve seen on the web, surprisingly, it really doesn’t offer anything in the way of file sharing. The closest that the service has to offer is the ability to restore your files on any of the computers that you’ve elected to backup, and it does that very, very well. But in terms of any integration, for example, with social networking services: nothing. Not so much as a photo share feature. This was sort of disappointing, because we would have really liked to see the Mozy quality of its high standard and caliber applied to file sharing, and not just backups.
Support
You can kind of gauge and measure the quality of a service by how much support they throw behind the service. With Mozy, what you’ll find is a ton of support, more than what we’re used to with these online backup, storage, and file sharing services. You basically have 3 very thorough options when it comes to support: the knowledge base, which the user community contributes the most; you have the the manuals (for both the Windows and the Mac clients); and you have support portal. Heck, even the user community and the support portal’s got a tutorial. That all said, given that the service primarily only serves as a backup service, there really wasn’t anything for us to call on support about, so we didn’t really need it.
Price
Mozy is offering its backup services to home users and business users. On the home user side of its offerings, you basically have the free or the premium service. With the free service, you’re limited to 2 GB of storage space, which is hardly anything; so the service is obviously a marketing mechanic. With the premium home service, though, what you’re getting is unlimited storage capacity; that’s a huge sell right there. And though we found the service to be of a quality that’s super reliable, we really couldn’t see ourselves committing to a cloud service for more than a year. (Who knows what will be available next year, right?)
But for all of the consumer grade marketing and appeal that Mozy offers up on its site, we actually found the best deal to be for the business services, particularly the server backup service. Backing up in-house servers is an extremely costly thing to do, in terms of cash but also just in terms of the time that’s put into maintaining backup regiments. Now, Pro services are priced at the per desktop or server level, i.e. per CPU. Desktop licenses run at $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month, while server licenses run $6.95 + $0.50/GB per month.
On June 22, 2010 RAV wrote:
I use Mozy to backup my files, as a backup service it’s excellent. It does lack some features outside of backup as stated in the review. But if all you want is an online backup service Mozy is rock solid.