Complete Mozy Review – Is it Worth It?
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Mozy Review Summary
Mozy is the leading online storage and backup company. In our opinion it is the easiest, most affordable option in the online backup space. From installation to the inevitable restoration of files we found Mozy to be a fairly straight forward tool that worked just as you would expect it. Also, for less than $5 a month the piece of mind it grants you is a bargain. Best of all, everyone is entitled to a Free Trial of Mozy with a 2GB storage limit to try out the service. With that trial, there is really no reason to at least try it out for a while to see how you like it.
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Mozy Setup
Installing Mozy is a breeze. After you download the client from Mozy, just install the desktop client as you would any other piece of software for your computer, either Windows or Mac. After that log in with your account information. Mozy will scan your computer and present you with its default suggestions of files and folders you should backup. For most users nothing needs to be changed. If you know there is something extra special that you want backed up, you can select it here. Mozy will then give you a time estimate for the first backup (usually it will take a long time for the first backup to complete). After that, you’re all good to go!
Adjusting Mozy Settings
For most users no settings need to be adjusted. If you’re a power user though, you might like the options of scheduling your backups instead of having them run automatically. There are also bandwidth throttling options if you don’t want backup activities to slowdown your Starcraft 2 multiplayer gaming.
The First Backup
If you have a system filled up with years of videos, photos, music and who knows what else, expect your first backup to take a long, long time. Some people have reported a few days, some people have reported weeks. Given that Mozy allows you to back up external drives as well as internal ones, its not a surprise that terabytes worth of data take a long time to get themselves all the way up to the cloud. The simple reporting interface they built for Mozy tells you plainly enough how the progress of your backup is, well, progressing. Unless you enjoy watching paint dry, there really isn’t a reason even to look at Mozy once you’ve gone through the initial setup phase.
Ongoing Backups
Like we said earlier, you probably won’t even look at Mozy unless something has gone horribly, horribly wrong, and that’s a good thing. Ongoing backups with Mozy go on in the background of your computer, without you having to do anything. Once the initial backup is completed, Mozy will only upload the files you make changes to, or new files entirely. This saves on bandwidth and CPU usage. The ongoing system requirements of Mozy are really quite light.
You’ll also notice handy little icons that popup over all your files as you navigate around your computer. Files that are synced with Mozy show green, files not yet backed up are red. If you add a new album’s worth of MP3s for example, you’ll see red exclamation points all over the place at first. In a few minutes though, they all turn to a reassuring green check mark letting you know it’s all good.
When the Worst Happens – Restoring from Mozy
Let’s face it, when your computer crashed you probably won’t be in the mood to get on the phone with someone in India and scream at them to replace your files for the report that’s due tomorrow. With Mozy, you don’t have to do that, because you can replace all your files yourself. Just open up the Mozy client, or install it on your newly wiped computer and pick the files you want to restore. While uploading your first backup may take a while, restoring files doesn’t. Once you pick the files to download, Mozy will put the files back right where they were before, unless you tell it to put them somewhere else. You can also restore individual files if you accidentally deleted that report too early.
Alright, what’s this going to cost me?
So all this piece of mind stuff sounds pretty good right? Mozy actually looks even better though when you find out the price, $4.95 a month. Now this is pretty cheap, but if you think that’s still expensive, let’s do some math. Now Mozy gives you unlimited back up space, but let’s just say you were thinking about buying a 1 terabyte hard drive for your backup needs. On Amazon that would cost you about $150 up front. To reach the break even point, you would need to use that drive for almost three years before you even break even. Now the odds are that drive you be both out of date and broken by the time you ever reached that point. Also, keep in mind that if your house were to ever burn down, you get robbed, or something of that ilk happens to you, your traditional drive backup is toast as well.