Having been using Mozy's MozyHome service, which offers unlimited storage of data, for a year now, we feel qualified to tell you from first-hand experience that it's smashing. Mozy works on PC and Mac, and automatically monitors your entire computer -- or just the files and folders you tell it to -- and backs them up in the background whenever they're changed.
After signing up you'll download a small program that sits in the background of your computer (meaning you won't notice it's running). After telling it which folders or hard disks on your machine you want it to watch, it will monitor all files within them for changes, and upload all and any that are altered.
It does this for as many tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data you own, for one set price per month: $4.95 (about £3.20). That's your entire hard disk backed up for the cost of a pint of beer every month. Should your machine go down, you can download your data over the Internet, or use the Mozy Web site to download individual files or sets of files. If you have tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data, you can pay for Mozy to burn it to several DVDs and FedEx them to you.
How good is it?
In our experience, very. Our initial backup was 220GB, and took two or three weeks to back up entirely. But the backup didn't noticeably slow down either our PC or Mac, and the amount of your Internet connection it uses can be controlled within the app to make sure it doesn't kibosh your browsing.
We never needed to perform a complete system restore, but we made a point of accessing Mozy's Web site to download files anyway. Assuming we lost all of our documents, we selected to download our My Documents folder from Mozy. It took a while for the site to prepare the download, but after getting an email to tell us it was ready we headed over to Mozy's site once more and downloaded our entire collection of documents. And yes, they were all present and correct after being decrypted by the Mozy software on our computer.
Limitations to note: additional computers cost extra, and downloading individual files from a backup can take a few minutes -- it's not for you if you regularly need to access individual files quickly.
The ideal user?
Anyone who wants to backup an entire hard drive, rather than just a small selection of files.
Next: Jungle Disk...
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Anonymous 7 June, 2011 07:17
First, I disagree with some of the points, Cloud is the future and by cloud I mean real cloud, like Amazon, MS, Rackspace, not proprietary storage, we all do remember carbonite lost their data in 2009 and blamed it on hardware, Also its useless to use a backup without blocklevel technology, like backing up your PST file, next time I only want to backup the changes! not the whole file, like most application do!, also I want dedupe technology! and complete cloud management so I can install it and control everything from the cloud, also it will be great to have disaster recovery, I tested most software's in the market, and most of them are big joke when it comes to business and real backup, and performance, the only 2 I found worth keep testing on my 72 business laptops are Mozy and Timeline Cloud, but Timeline Cloud won cuz of using Amazon S3 and Complete cloud disaster recovery