Mozy: Off-site Data Back-Up Solution (Review)

I finally committed to an off-site data backup solution (Mozy). I ended up going with a two year deal and saved 20% with this Mozy promotional code. I have to say though, I’m really not all that impressed. I’m glad that I have a service just in case of theft or fire, but I have no intentions of using this service again when I’m up for renewal.

For starters, the application itself is very slow. One of the neat things is that it (supposedly) encrypts all data housed on their servers. It’s kind of moot for me because I keep all of my important data encrypted. However, the application isn’t very efficient. It will encrypt a bunch of data and then stop encrypting while it uploads the information to the server. Come on now … the year is 2009, we’ve been working with multitasking machines for, what, 15 years? While that’s uploading, keep encrypting … move on to the next file, don’t get lazy on me.

With this application you can specify which files or folders to backup. I created a folder called “NoBackups” which is used for material I specifically don’t want to back up (which I marked as such). You’d think that if I put something in that folder, Mozy would not back it up. You’d think that … but you’d be wrong. Instead, Mozy sees a new item and decides that it should make a backup of it regardless of whether or not the folder is marked as ‘backup’. This oversight on their part makes for a good bit of wasted bandwidth.

I recently stumbled across ADrive. I like that they have a free 50G account. I’m curious to see how that works. I might have to look into that more thoroughly when I decide to mozy away from my current company.

Until next time …

D