Although not exactly BREAKING news… Being that we’ve talked about Mozy in the past on several occasions, I figured I’d pass on some bad news this great Friday and some good news if you’re willing to pack you bags and move over to a Mozy Alternative. As a refresher, Mozy.com pretty much set the bar a few years back when they introduced an Unlimited Backup plan for home users. You could pay just $4.95 a month and Mozy would keep all your treasured photos, music and documents safe and secure. All you needed was an internet connection. Sounds to good to be true right? Yeah, that’s because it was. On Feb. 3rd, Mozy announced that they will be adjusting their price structure for MozyHome, their unlimited backup plan. The blog post was a bit short on the details however the message is pretty ugly: In other words – “Our original business plan is not sustainable because we didn’t think people would be backing up Terabytes of RAW photos and 1080P HD family videos so unless we join the real-world and charge you something for our service, were gonna go broke.”. So, how has Mozy “adjusted” their pricing? Here ya go:
As you can see, the $4.95/Month Unlimited all-you-can-eat buffet gone, and it’s been replaced a $5.99 plan starting at 50 Gigs. Ick… Now I know you all have a lot of questions about this new program so let me see if I can answer a few of them.
What about the Free 2GB Backup Plan?
All is not lost! Mozy thankfully is keeping around their “Backup the World” slogan so they will be keeping around their 2 Gigs of free backup for home users. If this is all you’re using today, you probably don’t need to do anything other than keep an eye on your backup reports and make sure you don’t go over the two gig limit.
What about current Mozy customers who have hundreds of Gigs backed up?
Great question and here’s the answer from Mozy: In other words – you’re screwed. Sorry. Can’t sugar-coat that one. So if you’re in an annual agreement or multi-year agreement, your fine until that contract expires. After that, get ready to either pull all your data off the service or be prepared to pay a pretty penny to keep your data backed up.
Is there a Mozy.com alternative I can move over to?
The last thing Mozy wants you to do is to jump ship however as of today; there are several options if your willing to scrap your Mozy backups and move over to another service. Here’s a few I’d recommend today. I say today because although the service providers below claim they will never kill their unlimited offering, time will tell. For now, however, below are a few backup services I’d recommend any of your groovyReaders who are looing to jump ship from Mozy. More importantly, if you are not doing ANY backups today… Yeah – stop what you’re doing NOW, sign-up to a service and just pay the freaking $5 a month to get backed up!
Conclusions
So although the Mozy pricing change, at first, might have appeared to be a big deal, honestly it’s only a minor inconvenience if you’re willing to spend the time to cancel your account and sign-up with a new service like Crashplan. Of course, there’s also the option just to leave your data where it’s sitting, however, the main thing is that you do SOMETHING. So for those of you who currently don’t have a backup plan, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE get your home in order and get your data backed up! Did I miss your favorite backup service? Drop a comment below and tell me why you think I should have included it! Hopefully they don’t go lamer on us and start charging more like Mozy. Greedy bastards is what they are! At Groovypost and other’s recommendation I have moved over to Crashplan. I especially like that they offered a “move over from Mozy” discount which has made the plan very affordable ($6/month) for up to 10 computers. I too use Dropbox but not for photos, videos and music. Dropbox servers as my cloud repository for all my documents, presentations and work related materials. Includes all the features (plus extra!) of Mozy Pro, for a lower cost. Plus, here’s a link for 25% off for transferring Mozy users. http://www.opendrive.com?od=NGQzNjY4MzU5MTg1ZV8yNQ Comment Name * Email *
Δ Save my name and email and send me emails as new comments are made to this post.
