Mozy sounded too good to be true (and appears to be).
I have been hunting for a viable cross-platform replacement for Connected.com’s online backup (which is available only for PCs). Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to like about Connected.com. The UI is great, automated backup and restore (with versioning) just works, and you can encrypt your data with a private key (which is essential for a law firm – or anyone who cares about their data, for that matter).
What I don’t like about Connected.com is the price. It ends up being about $2.50/GB/mo. I also don’t like the silly plans. I want to just pay for what I use, and I just maxed out there latest “plan.” Nice plan.
I tried JungleDisk, which promises $0.15/GM/mo (and no plans), but it was clunky (would not install on all XP machines), did not support versioning, and created lots of temp files on my computers (both XP and OS X). No thanks.
So when I heard about Mozy (and its business counterpart MozyPro), I was very excited. Here was a business-class backup solution that appears to have it all: reasonable pricing ($0.50/GM/mo + $3.95/machine/mo), versioning, and private key encryption.
Except for the alleged private key encryption. Mozy’s website claims to support private key encryption. But if you install MozyPro with the default options, you will not be prompted for any private key encryption option, and all of your data will be encrypted with one of the Mozy-supplied keys. At least that’s how it worked for me. And I’ve got screen-shots of all 13 screens to demonstrate how private key encryption works (or fails to work, in this case).
Compounding matters, I’ve been calling and emailing Mozy support about this since 05/19/07 (two and a half weeks, which is a long time to wait for a backup service). My emails go unanswered. I just called both numbers (801-756-2331, 877-669-9776), and after being on hold for a long time, I was transferred to a busy signal.
I’m so glad I purchased eight licenses. If this is how Mozy treats it business customers, I can’t imaging how it treats consumer customers.
It seems to me that Mozy is not ready to be a reliable backup provider for businesses. Certainly not if private key encryption matters to you.
