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. |
2 Responses to “Backup Review: Mozy vs iDrive”
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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.
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.