Mozy 1.0

I discovered a Memopal (www.memopal.com) "cutting edge solution for online
backup"

They merged online backup, online storage and file sharing services into one product.

If you try this service you will notice that (contrary to most competitors):
- You can access your files in (true) real time with a web browser
- They really offer 250 GB (some competitors offer a fake unlimited web
space, they say "fair use")
- You can share a file or many files with the 1-click-share functionality
- Some of your files will be uploaded very very fast (turboupload)
- The service and website are in 10 different languages

I've also found two useful guide to online backup on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_backup

I had a horrible experience with Mozy and have cancelled my subscription. I wholeheartedly do not recommend Mozy- they lost over 20GB of data I had backed up.

Use JungleDisk, it's a little bit more $, but well worth it.

Users beware. We reviewed Mozy backup for a national mag and found it to be the buggiest most unreliable solution out of 8 candidates. It actually crashed one drive mandating an OS install.

They just added code MACMOZY to give a 15% discount through may 8 (according to today's newsletter).

I've been using Mozy very happily for most of a year now.
The initial backup may take several days or fail because of the slow transfer rate; if you are throwing several gigs at them it may be easier to slowly turn on one folder at a time. Once you get over that hump it works great.

I looked at it when they first launched, but their backup client failed to backup resource forks - which would render some files, and some applications, useless after a restore.

I assume that's all fixed, now?

The CPU usage was very high. The uninstall routines leaves much leftovers on the system too. For now, I have settled with DropBox for offsite backups - which is doing the job perfect.

Products like this are interesting to me. I'm old school and prefer to use simple (and free) tools to do this.
Just for interest, this is how I do my offsite backups:

I have one server at home, and another server at a remote site (relative's place).

I rsync (with rsync 3, released recently) my laptop to the local server (at home) over my wireless-N network. This is quick because the network is fast.

That server then rsyncs the backup that came from my laptop, over to the server at the remote site. The speed is slow, but that doesn't matter as it can take all day; it's a server, it's on 24/7.
I also rate-limit how much bandwidth rsync will use so as not to flood my connection nor the remote connection.

Naturally, I didn't do the initial backup in this fashion; I backed up to a disk and took the disk to the remote site for the initial backup.
And rsync only transfers the changes made to my files. So actually it doesn't need that much bandwidth at all.

The data is transferred over ssh, so it's fully secure. I also have my servers and each network protected by iptables or openbsd/pf (that is, one is using centos/iptables, the other openbsd and pf).

I've been an early adopter of Mozy, but then the app's and servers' shortcomings made me cancel the subscription.

On my MBP, the application simply stopped connecting to backup servers. Backups kept failing and I really didn't have the time to keep asking for a solution in support chats every time—I simply moved to a ChronoSync+JungleDisk solution using Amazon S3 storage. It took me a full afternoon to set up but has been working flawlessly ever since, for an average bill of $9 per month.

On my girlfriend's Macbook, Mozy.app does work, but servers are slow. And when I say slow I mean 3-4 KB/s slow. We're in Italy so I guess it just might be the distance and our connection, but we do get ~1 Mbit/s uploads to Amazon S3 (i.e., as advertised by our ISP).

Restores, quite frankly, SUCK. What my girlfriend got after a HD crash was a bunch of disk images (.dmg files) containing her files in no particular order. The mess was particularly tedious for us to sort through since a single folder's content might span multiple .dmg's—e.g., imagine some of the songs from Artist X's iTunes folder being in one .dmg with others in another file.

Since there is no facility to automatically restore from DMG files, you can imagine how long it took us to get files back where they belong. This procedure is also very prone to dangerous mistakes since you constantly risk to overwrite a folder with another by the same name but with different contents.

I have used Mozy almost a year now.

I am mixed on the product. Mainly using on Windows and had issues with large backups July of 07. It took them a month to resolve the issue. Once it was fixed my backups worked no problem. They did credit me a month of service since it had the backup problem. But I had to ask for it.

In the last month our Windows computer crashed. I was not worried since I backup with Mozy. However I hit yet another bug or problem with their service. I am unable still today to do a web or even a dvd restore. My brother on the other hand can do a web restore no problem. I suspect it might be due to the fact I have 250GB of data and he has 70GB of data. However, their Virtual Drive restore worked for me after I rebuilt the computer. I was able to restore my data via this method while they work out the web restore issues. The only problem is it does not give you a lot of control. Its like an explorer interface to your drive so you can't really select specific files in multiple directories. You either restore a directory or all sub folders and wait for that to complete to move on to what you need next.

The restore features leave a lot to be desired like restore anything after a specific date. Or only restore newer files etc. You can however have it rename existing files on a restore. Nice but I rather restore newer files.

The good news is I got my data back. The bad news is the web restore feature still does not work for me and other customers. It looks a lot of work to restore my 250GB as I had to decide what I needed right away and what I could wait a week for the restore to complete.

Through this experience I found their e-mail support sucks on the weekend and would have rather not even gotten a response. Chatting with a live person has proven better results. However like I said it has been now a month and I still can't do web restores. I ask to have all my data sent to me on DVD but the same code that does the web restore does the DVD restore. They offered me no solution but to wait and I am still waiting for web restores to work. I am on them twice a week about the issue and I hope they have it fixed soon. We shall see.

In the end they did have my data and I was able to get it back, just a lot more hassle than I expected and a lot more work on my part.

The other thing I would tell you is they don't backup a lot of data I would prefer by default. I had to spend a decent amount of time making sure specific profile application data etc was backed.

For lack of something better at the same price I am mostly happy with Mozy and may load it on my Mac. Its cheap but I feel in some regards you get what you pay for. Support is weak and there is no one to call on the phone. Its e-mail or chat only. I think its work the money to have the off site backup at the current price.