Backup Review: Mozy vs iDrive
TL;DR: Mozy sucks, pay a little more for iDrive
I just cancelled my 2-year subscription to Mozy’s unlimited home online backup product after I upgraded to Windows 7. See, it thought I was on an entirely new computer, and asked me to backup everything again. This is not horribly unreasonable, so I said, OK–let’s setup a new backup set. After letting it run for days, it would backup a small subset of files (3%) and die. Not cool. Some of the well-known issues with Mozy include:
- If Mozy fails to access 10 files, it gives up entirely on your 100s of GB backup set.
- Mozy is rate-limited and slow, uploading is less than 1Mb/s
- Opening the Mozy backup set configuration window can take 5-10 minutes
- Mozy slows down your pc
Mozy’s status window while a backup is in-progress
On the plus side of Mozy, there are a few nice things about it:
- $4.95 a month for unlimited GB of files (if you can ever manage to upload them)
- Tech support is fairly responsive, they refunded my credit card promptly
Today I signed up for the free 2GB trial version of iDrive and I’m much more impressed. The service is quick and snappy, fast to let you pick out your backup set, and even faster to upload. I was able to sustain a transfer rate of 3.3Mb/s, and the GUI clearly showed me logs of what files had been backed up. My computer remained responsive while backing up.
The suave iDrive backup screen
The only downside to iDrive is price. You pay $150/yr for 500GB of space. Mozy would cost you just $60, roughly 1/3 as much. However, my overall experience with the iDrive software more than makes up for the price differential. There’s no point in backing up your precious files if the software you use has serious trouble doing so. While I have no doubt that should I need to restore my backup, Mozy would work fine, it’s getting files there in the first place that’s tough.
What’s your experience been?
Update: Wow, just going through my disk to free up space, and saw that after I uninstalled it MozyHome left an 800MB directory in Program Files. WTF!
| This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 7:37 pm and is tagged with precious files, backup product, configuration window, serious trouble, nice things, no doubt, mozy, 1mb, new computer, downside, 2gb, trial version, differential, subset, uploading, tl, tech support, credit card. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
1. IDrive is SUPERFAST – backed up 20GB in less than 2 days, and I have just a plain broadband connection
2. Their 24×7 technical support via chat was very helpful in the 2 times
I needed assistance; they even remoted to my machine to find the
mistake I made. I appreciate good, always available technical support.
3. I tested restore – and it was superfast too.
get 6GB free
http://www.idrivesync.com/?uid=5A46B6NZLZ
iDrive initial backup for Mac (Lion) is slower than a glacier in reverse. I have a fast computer and fast internet connection and it’s going to be 30 plus hours for the initial backup if it ever completes. (Two prior starts failed. I may have screwed them up since iDrive help is useless and the interface does not explain what is going on.) I have about 63 gb in my backup set, and 30 plus hours! I’m so far into it that I’m trying to complete it but I’ll look for a better service. Thank goodness I signed up on a monthly basis.
Idrive is pretty slow. It reports ~2000 kB/s but it seems to be kilobits/sec, not kilobyte/sec.
I did the math on your screenshot, and it’s not 3.3 MB/s but 0,4 MB/s. Color me unimpressed.
I signed up for idrive, and I cannot believe how SLOW this is – during an inital backup, I have one computer with about 200 gig on it, and according to the time calculation, I will need to have it running for 24 days straight, 24/7. Just for the inital backup. Can this be right?
Why does no one ever mention that Mozy deletes backed up files if it doesn’t find it on your hard drive? Assumes you deleted that one file out of 250,000 on purpose and 30 days later kills the online back up?
On the plus size, when I tested it, it updated my Outlooks pst files quickly! (slow uploads aside). Block level update seems to work for the,
Idrive keeps everything! No worries there. And prior versions of the same file DO NOT go against your overall storage limit. But they seem to upload my Outlook PST file whole ever night… slow that way, but initial load is fast as you mentioned.
On the down side, the idrive app itself is a little flaky, tech support as well. They upgrade versions and never list what the fixes were (their tech support’s answer to everything is install the latest, without commenting whether it addresses your issue. If they release multiple fixes in a short period, that is all you will get out of the,).
My two cents. If there were somewhere else that 1) kept everything and 2) didn’t hold daily versions against my limit (archive ability) and was close to the same price, I would try them. But since there isn’t, I won’t.
I was using iDisk on a Mac. It always looked like it was doing its job, but when I went to download my material (after some data issues) HUGE chunks were missing. It had imitated the file structure, and saved some data, but there were all these holes.
IT gave me no suggestions and seemed to admit it was buggy.
Needless to say, I was angry.
I concur regarding the piecemeal backups and missing chunks.
This is a PIECE OF JUNK on the Mac. 3 weeks of UNRESPONSIVE and MISLEADING support, 2 reinstalls (per their instructions) and one “update” ended with a phone call in which “Jason” told me “WHAT DO YOU EXPECT FOR $5″.
BUGGY—– “Backup Set Size” is never accurate once you change ANY selection of files. The program stops regularly due to “connection problems” (Note- I have NO OTHER connection problems on my Comcast account). The thing takes HOURS to work through confirming all of the files it has previously backed up BEFORE it starts backing up new files (then stops – see above).
SLOWER THAN MOLASSES—– 3 weeks of forcing this thing to continuously back up (set schedule to restart 1 hour after it stops due to a “connection problem”) and it is doing LESS THAN 1GB a DAY. So if you have 100 GB to back up you better be ready to wait a HALF YEAR to get a full backup. I monitor my incoming and outgoing data, and after the software finally works through the previously backed up files, it sends a 5 second burst of data at 2mbps (my upload speed is reliably 3mbps) then WAITS 30 to 40 seconds before the next one! THIS APPEARS TO BE PURPOSEFULLY THROTTLING DOWN the data rate. So the whole idea they provide 150GB is a JOKE.
This is JUNK, MISLEADING, and BUGGY garbage. Support is useless and without any idea what they are doing. ZERO STARS if I could give it.
You should check out Jungle Disk. I killed my mozy account a few months ago in favor of that. Its can be a lot more expensive (depending on how much you backup). But for me I’m storing about 60 gig and its not unreasonable. I like that all my files are on S3 as well. The backup application itself is a lot more stable compared to mozy.
I never heard of that service. Can they be trusted?
found this coupon https://mozy.com/?code=KMLYU7
you get extra 512 MB free (checked, it works!)
No major problems here with Mozy. We’ve even used its professional service for servers and although the interface is way over-engineered, it works and we test-restore 10’s of gigs a week.
With that said, I’m on Vista (work) and Mac (home) and have not tried it with Windows 7. On my PC I get > 1Mb/s frequently with Mozy. I agree that the configuration window does take too long to open, especially since I’m just pointing at one directory and saying “backup up this directory and all sub-directories”. Also, these backups are about 25gigs on my work PC, and over 100gigs on my Mac.
I would concur on this one. I found IDrive better for online backup, and dropbox better for syncing data. I have over 100GBs of data backed up to IDrive and about 10GB data synced via dropbox between my 2 laptops.