Comments on: Mozy’s not all that

By: Sven Dens

Sven Dens — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:41:37 +0000

Hey guys!

This looks like a great service (except for the UI then, Aral ;-)).
But am I right if I understand that in fact you are rsyncin’ your data over SSL to a remote server?

In that case, this service is impossible to use if you live in Belgium (like I do). All ISP’s in Belgium seriously limit the monthly allowed data traffic for their subscribers.
I myself am a subscriber of edpnet.be, a company with the second-to-largest allowed traffic available in this country, and still my allowed monthly bandwidth is only 60GB.
That means it is impossible for me to start the initial backup, at least if I don’t want to wait 2 months for it.

That’s a shame, would love to see the EU do something about that.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:39:31 +0000

I think you’d be much happier with Jungledisk, I dropped Mozy a long time ago. The 15GB of data I have backed up currently cost me $4/month.
Jungledisk also mounts itself as a network drive so you can back up to it using any tool (Superduper?) you like, although the Jungledisk client works fine for me. I also use it to back up my two webservers.

By: Aral

Aral — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:13:18 +0000

Hi Keith,

Thanks!

That’s a horrible UI flaw.

Hmm, I might look into using it then but they really need to change that interaction. It does look like it’s starting over.

By: Keith Peters

Keith Peters — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:08:19 +0000

OK, not quite 70 GB, but almost, and took a couple of weeks, but here you can see it got interrupted dozens of times, and finally finished.

http://www.bit-101.com/misc/mozy.png

By: Keith Peters

Keith Peters — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:00:25 +0000

You can definitely interrupt backups. I have over 70 GB worth of photos, music, movies, other files. Yeah, the first backup took forever. Over a week. But it got interrupted many, many times. It may be a UI flaw. It looks like it’s starting over. But if you dig in, you’ll see really is continuing where it left off. It does eventually finish.

By: Earl

Earl — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:52:56 +0000

Mozy is sloooow and I agree that not being able to interrupt a back-up is simply a bad application design. I’ve been using Mozy to back up my digital photo’s for almost a year now and it does seem to work ok with that. My backups are for 84,533 files, 22.9 GB.

You didn’t say how much you were trying to back up.

I wouldn’t dare to try and back up my whole computer with Mozy for the same reasons you outlined.

By: David Arno

David Arno — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:13:54 +0000

In theory I’d recommend you use Carbonite instead. Just like Mozy, you tell it a bunch of stuff to back up and the first time around this takes ages. Carbonite has the huge advantage that it can be interrupted too. When the machine comes back on and reconnects to the internet, it carries on backing up as if nothing had happened.

The huge massive show-stopper downside though is that they are taking forever and a day to release a Mac client. Mac users can sign up to be notified when the beta program starts though: http://www.carbonite.com/CustomerSupport/ViewPost.aspx?postid=149 (try to contain your excitement folks!)