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Mozy review

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Verdict

A fine choice for power users, albeit at a premium for multiple machines

Review Date: 18 Aug 2010

Reviewed By: Stuart Andrews

Price when reviewed: Free

Overall Rating

Features & Design
6 stars out of 6

Value for Money
4 stars out of 6

Ease of Use
5 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

As Carbonite's biggest rival, Mozy used to have the edge on features and options, but lost out on ease of use. Now, with its second-generation client, Mozy has made great strides to remedy that situation. The revised, tab-based interface is less cluttered and it's easier to change settings, choose which files to backup, and restore any files you might have lost. Mozy can even be set to put Carbonite-style green ticks and red exclamation marks on your files and folders to show whether they're backed up or not.

Mozy doesn't offer continuous backup as such. Instead, it backs files up automatically when your computer is idle, and there are settings to control how long your system has to be idle and how frequently this happens. As before, control is a major theme, to the extent that Mozy provides a bandwidth throttle and a speed slider that decides what system resources the client can consume.

Mozy supports versioning, enabling you to restore earlier versions of corrupt or botched documents, and it's also the only online backup service we've seen to offer local backup to hard disk or USB key on top of offline backup. Files can be restored using the Mozy client, Windows Explorer or a web-based interface. Sadly, the latter method is cumbersome, as Mozy spends several minutes creating a restore package for your file before allowing you to download it. Speed otherwise was perfectly acceptable, with the service taking 6hrs 34mins for the initial 1GB backup, and 29mins, 59secs to restore 500GB of photos.

Interestingly, Mozy offers you a choice when it comes to security. If you don't trust the company and the standard 448-bit Blowfish encryption, you can select a private key system and choose your own password. Just be aware that if you forget the key, Mozy won't have it on record.

Once you get beyond its 2GB free option, Mozy isn't the cheapest service. The unlimited capacity home service is reasonable, but supports only one PC. To cover more systems, you'll need to pay for the Pro service, at £3.99 per system and 50p per gigabyte. This can make Mozy a more expensive choice than Carbonite for a multi-PC home or small office, although business users also get 24/7 support, a custom company domain and useful server backup options. With this in mind, Mozy is arguably the best straight backup service for the more advanced user, particularly as you can do local and online backup without having to configure two applications.

Author: Stuart Andrews

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Comments

User comments

Mozy options

The article forgot to mention that an unlimited user can add 4 other machines to his account, for an additional 54.89£ per year per machine, unlimited backup.

By wimmy on 18 Aug 2010

backup options

Does mozy support .exe backups by default as I have select these manually within Carbonite?

By cathalobrien on 18 Aug 2010

Compression

I don't think there's any compression and so this makes uploads slow.

By allden on 19 Aug 2010

Backup options and compression

Backup options - with Mozy you can select folders not just individual files so exe files can be included.

Mozy does use compression. Uploads will always be slow as most people use ADSL that has very slow upload speeds.

By Nick_Russell on 19 Aug 2010

UK Pricing

I have been using the free 2GB version of Mozy for 6 months now - it just sits quietly in the background, doing its job.

It's a pity that the UK site is so much more expensive than the US one.

£4.99 v $4.95 a month
£54.89 v $54.45 a year

By emteec on 19 Aug 2010

Forget UK pricing

I've just signed on for 2 years with Mozy US - no problem; US prices. We have four machines, but only one has critical data, so I'll be doing periodic backups from these onto a USB drive and including this with the backups on the main PC. Good value at under $1 a week - about 65p!

By davidcroucher on 20 Aug 2010

Unacceptable

Mozy sent out emails to users (at least home users) saying that due to a transfer of data from USA to UK, there would be some inconvenience, for which they would waive one months fee (4.99 UKP).

What they say is that this would be a complete wipe out of the backup and the Mozy client software would have to upload all the files from scratch - 35 GB on an ADSL line in my case.

I am FURIOUS. Surely their SOLE responsibility is to keep the data. I am demanding a full refund of all monies paid and will be looking for another backup service. If I had suffered a theft of my PC and ext. hard drive any time over the last 2 weeks, I would have lost all of my 7.5 thousand images.

COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE

By Balderdash999 on 1 Dec 2010

Unacceptable 2

My last post should have read - What they didnt say.
i.e. Mozy concealed this 'small' detail

By Balderdash999 on 1 Dec 2010

MOZY is unfriendly & too expensive

Mozy have just massively increased their prices giving me less than 14 days to find another provider or face an increase from $5 per month to $80 per month.

They have unilaterally removed their unlimited product offer with effectively no notice and no reasonable alternative.

I would use them again. Feels to me that you can't trust them.

For anyone in a similar position, take a look at Livedrive. They are also offering 25% off for ex-Mozy customers.

By John_Doe_II on 3 Feb 2011

BoundlessCloud

As John_Doe_II mentioned, LiveDrive is a great alternative. You can also look for LiveDrive resellers (like www.boundlesscloud.com) who sell cheaper than the parent company (only $40/year for truly unlimited backup). Hope this helps.

By JustinSingleton on 19 Jun 2011

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