Changing my backup plan – no more Mozy

I’ve blogged before about the importance of having multiple computer backups. For my laptop, I regularly backup files to my home computer and to a network attached storage drive. For my desktop at home, I have been using Mozy, an online backup service for the last couple of years. I’ve had good luck with them and it has worked great, up until now. It works by uploading files from your computer to their online file server when your computer is idle. Everything is encrypted and you can restore your files from anywhere if you accidentally delete them or have a hard drive failure. The problem is that they have just changed their pricing scheme dramatically.

They definitely have the right to change their business model, but I can’t imagine they really thought this through. They are getting a ton of negative publicity online and I know I will be switching. They used to have a plan that was $4.95 per month per computer for unlimited backup space. Their new pricing scheme is more complicated and you pay by how much you use. For me, I had about 150gigs of data uploaded so my bill will triple each month. Thanks, but no thanks, especially when their competition still has cheaper plans.  I’m checking out both crashplan and backblaze, and they both have unlimited plans for around $5 per month. I may invest in an external hard drive/server for home as well.  The said part for me is that it literally takes a month or two to upload that much data over my slow DSL internet connection. That’s why I hate to change, but I don’t really have a choice. I simply don’t want to waste money and I don’t like how they changed the price without warning. Crashplan is also offering a 15% discount for ex mozy users – check out http://crashplan.com/mozyonover

Mike

I am a former design engineer who now pastors Cornerstone Community Church in Galax, Virginia. I'm passionate about following Jesus and I love technology. I've been married to Jennifer for 28 years, and we have three adult children.

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1 Response

  1. Sam says:

    I’m faced with the same problem (after almost finishing my initial 400gb upload to Mozy). I’ve been playing around with the idea of asking a relative to create a virtual network with me using Hamachi for off-site backups. We could both buy USB drives, do an initial backup, switch drives, & then backup over the virtual network each night.

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