looking at mozy

Well, Mozy sent me an invite to beta-test there mac client. I already saw them as the client to recommend to people. The 30 days retention, and private passwords are good enough reasons, but there are more! Mozy does block upload, and they allow you some file sharing ability. These are all things you can't do with carbonite. Oddly enough most of these are features I cannot do during this beta testing time.

I do have one advantage windows users don't seem to have (maybe in vista) i can use spotlight searches to find files I want to backup. I haven't gotten that to work yet; but I will be posting again if I get that working. However searching for a string seems like a silly way around it. I would rather use item kind, or content type tree. That would be really useful. Though if I do like it, I will be buying the unlimited storage, then I would just backup everything, excluding cashe and index files, so such features won't matter.

Like all online tools, it takes a long time for inital backup. They warn you that it may take days. They don't peg your upload; they send 1 or 2 files, then stop for a while. I've seen carbonite do this same thing. Once this thing goes public, I will have a good cross platform backup solution. At it's price point, 4.95 a month with a 1-year contract, it will make a break-even point with amazon somewhere around 30GB. The main reason I say mozy is better than some form of backup on s3 is retention. It is always important to have a couple days of backup just because you don't always know you need it.