Goodbye Mozy, Hello Crashplan
Mozy’s price increase is still reverberating around the internet, and people are looking for a new home for their online backups. I’ve been using Mozy for about a year now, have been generally happy, and have recommended it to several family members and friends. However, after getting my 300% price hike notification, which is actually pretty low compared to many, I started investigating the competition.
There’s lots of competition in this space, including Amazon, Carbonite, CrashPlan, Backblaze, Google, just to name a few, so its hard to see the logic in Mozy’s pricing move.
In the end, I migrated my data (about 250GB) over to CrashPlan. Here’s why:
- Pricing. The unlimited family plan (2-10 computers), along with 15% migration discount, is $5.10-$10.20/mo
- Backup external drives. Some, like Carbonite, do not allow this.
- Data opt-in, not opt-out. Some services, like Backblaze, start with the assumption that you want to back up everything and its up to you to pair things down.
- Backup seeding. For a fee, they will send you a disk that you can fill with your initial backup to avoid the lengthy initial backup!
- Backup to other computers. You don’t just have to back up to the cloud.. You can backup to other computers you own, as well as to your friends computers, if you have linked accounts. Keep an extra external drive at a friend’s house, and you’ve got easy to access to a backup just across town that you can go pick up in an emergency!!
Access your accounts and backup status online. You don’t have to go to each and every machine to check status, as you have all that control online as well.
In the end, mozy’s price increase was a positive for me, as it made me go check out the competition. I was pleasantly surprised to find better options, and not just by price.