Mozy is the 2nd storage/backup site I tried. It offers 2 GB free, or 30GB for $4.95 per month, or 60GB for $9.95 per month. For home use, where you are probably stuck with upload speeds of 380k – 1 Mbps tops, going much past 40 or 50 GB for backup is probably not worth it. It will take days to upload, and days to download during a recovery. Once you have uploaded everything and are just synching, it doesn’t much matter. But the recovery would not be fun if you had too much data! (Then again, your download speed is probably more like 1.5 – 3 Mbps, or even 6 Mbps in some cases, and then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.)

I set up Mozy on a friends computer that I was working on. (Friends and family often ask me to look at their PC’s due to performance problems. The most common problems are lack of memory, disk fragmentation, spyware/adware, and tons of temporary files… ) Anyway, this PC just had 1.3 GB of data on it so I set up mozy to upload it. Mozy did it in just about 8 hours. My mandwidth use at that time was my max of 520Kbps upload, but I should note I was also running a different service on a different computer at the time, so it’s hard to say if Mozy would always max it out…

One of the nicest features of Mozy is that you can keep your own encryption key. Some services, such as streamload, don’t even encrypt your data. Other services encrypt it, but they keep the private key. Mozy will either keep the key for you, or let you keep your own. This is probably not an issue for lots of folks, and can be very dangerous. If you lose your key, there is nothing anyone can do to recover your encrypted data!

Mozy had a little app that you download, where you can tell it file types, or just give it the files/folders you want to save. Overall, I think Mozy is a nice little service. I plan on using the free service with some docs for now as I try both Carbonite and this out.

If you want to try Mozy, click here to signup so I get a little more free space:

Thanks!
Sean