Mozy: Free online backup for Mac
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Mozy was one of my favorite programs on Windows. It’s an automatic online backup system that worked very well. It was small, easy and just worked. They give you 2GB free or unlimited for $4.95/month which is incredible.
Mozy features:
- Open/locked file support
- 448-bit Blowfish encryption
- 128-bit SSL encryption
- Automatic or scheduled backups
- New and changed file detection
- Block level incremental backups
- Bandwidth throttling
- File versioning
- Public or private key encryption
Well the folk over at Mozy released a beta for Mac today. As soon as I seen the news, I started the install. Install was a breeze and in a few minutes it was searching my hard drive for “Backup Sets” which are pre-determined file types. These include Word and Excel files and Mac specific items such as iCal, Address book, iTunes Library and iPhoto Library. You can also choose individual files and folders if you would like too. I choose my Documents and SItes folders in addition to some Backup Sets as you can see below.
So far I’m only 62% done with my initial backup so I haven’t had a chance to try a restore yet. But if its anything like the Windows client was, it will be easy and seamless. So far I’m impressed by the beta. I haven’t run into any issues yet but I really haven’t done too much yet. The program runs in the menu bar so its out of the way. With 2GB’s of space for free, you really have no reason not to be backing up important files now.
Folks, Mozy absolutely sucks for anything more significant than an individual file or folder restore on the same system you are running the mozy client on. Do not trust them to be able to to restore an entire system or a large dataset over the web. Perhaps if you pay the for the DVD service you can get your data back, but their service is really flawed when it comes to a serious backup need or system-level restore. I lost my laptop hard drive on Tuesda morning, and thought my backups through Mozy would save me. Not so fast. I still might be ok, but it’s been painful.
1. The way it works is that they break up your fileset into small chunks (encrypted), and spread it out over multiple servers for security. While this sounds like a smart architecture, it took them over 12 hours to rebuild a 23 gb fileset. I’m not going to draw conclusions about their setup or technology, but this is not an acceptable scenario, nor something they disclose up front.
2. I’m on a 10+mbps broadband connection and regularly get 2-3mbps download speeds. The best I got from Mozy was a peak of 700kbps and an average of around 300. This means it took an entire day to download the restore archive, which still failed due to #3.
3. Their system is flawed in that it removed the restore archive from it’s location before download was complete. This means I’m sitting here with 22 GB of a 23 GB archive, and have to start over! Yes, I used a download manager. The problem is the file on their server is gone, not that my connection was interrupted.
So now I have 3 choices, to start over and risk the same result, pay for the DVD and incur more cost and lost time, or try the restore again but manually break it into folder-level chunks to ensure I can download the restore files as much smaller archives. All of which mean I lose another 2+ days of productivity and incur wasted time/costs. I’ll post this on my blog also…
Mozy rate limits your upload speeds as well. It’s totally f*&king worthless for anything more than a couple of gigs, and even that will take you several days to upload. This little tidbit of information is not mentioned in their FAQ anywhere.
Mozy has been such a disappointment.
Their online backup is industrial strength including unattended backup operation and 128-bit encryption.
Their file sharing is likely the most advanced on the Internet. They support both public and private file sharing. Their private sharing allows users to control who can view their shared files. That prevents shared personal photos and videos from leaking out on the Internet.
Recently, they added a feature that I believe no other file sharing site has – the ability to move and copy files between accounts. The work is all done on the backend, saving precious bandwidth, and speedy as there is no upload or download required.
@ Jennifer: File sharing with Mozy? how?
@Jennifer: How long have you been working for the PR department of Mozy?