Mozy online backup could be an interesting option for those who are in search of a rather inexpensive way of storaging their stuff in a remote and safe place. Up to 2 GB, Mozy is free; unlimited storage for 5 dollars a month.
Initially, Mozy was only for Windows; but since a couple of weeks there is a Mac beta too.
I’ve been using it to back up my thesis that I’m writing in Scrivener. I have other backup methods as well, but I have Mozy to backup my Scrivener project every 5 minutes. Works well so far.
How can they do this for free? That’s the part I can never figure out.
Margaret
That’s very simple, Margaret. They offer you 2 GB for free, and that’s very nice indeed. But they know of course that the home folder of most people is much larger than that. So they hope that first you’ll try out their service with a part of your home folder, and then eventually will decide to storage all your stuff on their computers. And then you’ll have to pay, of course. But five dollars a month is not much; and if it really works and will show itself to be userfriendly, then it could be very convenient to many people.
Like talazem, I do have other backup methods as well, but I’m ready to pay 60 dollars a year for this kind of extra security; provided it works really well, of course.
Sounds right to me, Timotheus. What is the speed like with Mozy? I use iDisk since I have a .Mac account for other purposes, and to be honest, while I know it’s slow, for the amount of stuff I store it works fine. But that’s a more expensive option for something as pokey as iDisk which has a limited amount of storage, so this sounds interesting! 2 gigs would be enough for what is most important and I could have two off-location back ups instead of just one for those extra special files!
Also I’d consider it for larger amounts of data. iDisk being so slow makes it useless to me for larger backups, like my mammoth DT Pro db which, even zipped, is 100s of megs large. iDisk takes forever to load something that size (I can’t believe Apple hasn’t done something about this after all this time!)
Though I still don’t know how Mozy can afford to offer unlimited storage for a mere $5 a month!
Alexandria
Hey, Timotheus, if you have a referral code, you can get credit for people signing up and maybe get more free storage.
Well, Mozy says its going to take over 4 hours to back up about 500 megs of data and I have a very high speed cable connection. Of course it does incremental backups thereafter, so it will be faster. But that doesn’t seem much faster, or perhaps even slower, than iDisk.
It took Mozy about 12 hours to copy my 1,8 GB Documents Folder (I have an upstream of 768 Kbit / s). But it’s a very silent background process, which requires only a limited amount of memory space and processor capacity, because the real bottle-neck is the limited upstream.
And the incremental backups are completely imperceptible.
Margaret:
I agree with Timotheus’s assessment in the short term, but I think – like many “Web 2.0” companies, they’re thinking bigger.
Consumer bandwidth issues will be a thing of the past soon. Data storage prices continue to go down, and at the same time, data storage technology is moving ahead by leaps and bounds. So adding capacity for an offsite backup business keeps getting cheaper.
Now factor in the following: Our files are getting bigger (music, movies, TV shows, all in increasing levels of quality). And more and more, people are using the web as a natural extension of their daily lives; it’s where many go first watch a show/look up a number/write a letter/listen to a song/buy some shoes. A lot of us go to the web without thinking about it.
Imagine being a trusted name when tens of millions of people decide that backing up their (huge amounts of) data offsite and online is as natural and normal as looking up driving directions. You’ve reinvented the filing cabinet, and figured out how to get paid monthly for its use.
This year, it’s “how do they do it.” Five years from now, when the best of these businesses sell their committed, trusting customer base to Google or Amazon for, like, ALL the money ever? It’s gonna be “why didn’t I think of that?”