Review of Mozy 2.0 Online Backup Solution

Overview and History

Mozy Backup is the brainchild of the Decho Corporation which is a entirely owned subsidiary of the EMC2 Corporation, a fortune 500 company. Decho was founded in 2005. They currently own offices in Seattle, Washington with subsiduary offices in Pleasant Grove, Utah; London, England; Shanghai, China; Montreal, Canada; and Bangalore, India.

Mozy currently has over 1,000,000 customers and over 50,000 businesses, securing a total in excess of 25 petabytes of files - that's 25 thousand terabytes or 25 million gigabytes!

Features

Security Options

MozyPro is a totally secure online backup provider. All traffic to and from the Mozy servers is encrypted with 128bit SSL encryption which is the industry standard. Once on the servers your data is encrypted with either 448bit Blowfish technology or your own 256bit AES private key encryption. This is the best available security.

As for datacenter security, the data centers implement round-the-clock on-site monitoring and security, state-of-the-art fire detection and suppression power distribution and seismic safeguards that can withstand a 7.5 magnitude earthquake.

Backup Features

Mozy provides block level incremental online backups and can be organized to backup either on a schedule or constantly in the background. In our tests, it took less than half an hour to backup 2,048,000bytes of data on a standard 8mbps DSL line uploading and downloading different data. Also, because of the block level nature of Mozy's backup process, open or locked files can be backed up easily.

A progress indicator is available if you click on the icon in the system tray. When first setup Mozy Online Backup will backup all the current user's profile files including documents, music, videos, etc. However, it is a easy task to add or remove folders and files to/from the backup sets. The Home editions do not permit backup of network drives although the Pro and Enterprise editions do. None of the editions give backup of removable media.

The commercial editions - MozyPro and MozyEnterprise - accept online backup solutions to manage Exchange server, SQL server and LDAP directories such as Active Directory and Lotus Notes.

Restore Options

File restore is by request via the web portal, the desktop application or by right-clicking in a folder and selecting restore. Once a restore is requested, MozyPro packages all the files requested into a compressed file and emails you when the restore is ready for recovering. File versioning is active on all backed up media, so you can decide to restore an older variant of any file you have backed up. Files can be restored to their original location or to any location of your choosing.

Control and Analysis

MozyPro Online Backup accomodates your needs by allowing you to manage how much CPU and bandwidth are available to the program. These can be easily oriented from the desktop application. Proxy servers are also allowed and Mozy can be configured to use these via the desktop application.

All activity that Mozy carries out is logged and can be examined either from the desktop application or via the web portal.

Interface

MozyPro provides a great deal of information and allows centralized configuration and logging which is ideal to manage backups on PCs and laptops that may not even be in the same office. Multiple accounts can be setup as well as multiple devices. A more constricted portal is provided with MozyHome.

Device Support

Currently Mozy Online Backup only supports backup of MAC and PC clients. In addition MozyPro backs up MAC And PC servers.

Limitations:

- MozyHome cannot be used commercially.

- The basic free account is limited to 2Gb of storage though this can be increased by allowing other people to become users. For every further signup you get an extra 250Mb of storage.

- There are no limits set on the size or type of individual files.

- There are also no limits on the amount of data backed up or restored.

- Mozy free allows backup of 2 devices under 1 user account; MozyHome allows upto 5 devices but each additional device will cost $4.95 per month per device.

- Both MozyPro and MozyEnterprise accept bottomless devices and users but there is a cost for each device.

- File retention - the amount of time a file remains available for restore after it has been 'deleted' - is 30 days for all account types.

File Sharing and Collaboration

MozyPro is not a file sharing or collaboration tool. It is a backup system. That being said, it does support sign-in, sign-out and multiple levels of security to an individual file level.

Synchronization

You can synchronize multiple devices.

Web 2.0 Integration

Mozy does not provide social networking integration.

Customer Support

Mozy's customer support is commonsense: They offer detailed user guides, detailed FAQs and a knowledgebase. There is also a blog and loads of testimonials and case studies available. Email support is available to all types of accounts, but, telephone support is only free to MozyPro and MozyEnterprise users and live chat is not usable to free users.

Usability

MozyHome is very effortless to use. You can go from signup to backup in less than 5 minutes and it really is a 'set it and forget it' procedure. MozyPro has a slightly steeper learning curve but this is understandable since it provides much more features.

Conclusion

If you are trying to find a trustworthy, set-it-and-forget-it backup provider that is reasonably priced, will increase or contract to fit in with your needs and is a snap to configure then Mozy Online Backup is your ideal solution. If you are looking to backup huge amounts of information that changes on a routine basis then there are more appropriate and cheaper solutions available.