Robust, Reasonably Priced Online Backup – At Last

I have long been looking for safe, secure, simple and reasonably priced online backup. I have a lot of files, so offers of 1 or 5 free gigabytes of storage online have little interest to me. Indeed, to-date, many of the services I have tried have been unreasonably expensive or terribly unreliable. Many online storage rates, though falling, continue to be in the range of $1-2 per gigabyte per month. For me, that would mean an annual bill of around $300 for back-up storage. This is probably 2-3x the cost of buying a new external hard drive each year and above my budget.

Nonetheless, online storage is very attractive for me. I have never had the good fortune for my hard drive to fail just as I was coming home from a business trip. Invariably, crises can occur at any time and usually when you’re nowhere close to your back up drive. Additionally, I don’t want to lug around a physical back-up drive with me or wait until the weekend to do a back-up of my files.

Over the last year, I have signed up with, and then cancelled just about all the different online back-up solutions and I think I have found one that I really like now: Mozy. It’s not perfect, but it’s is far and away the best and the best value of any solution I have tried to date.

Mozy is a pure back-up solution, not a file sharing solution or a collaboration or synchronization offering. The software runs in the background, tracking changed files and then updating them online when the computer is idle or at scheduled intervals. The first back-up, all 22 Gigs of it, took almost 10 days of night-time updates, but since then the back-ups have been up-to-date almost every day.

The system allows you to select files, folders, or types of files for backup and it also allows any combination of the two. Once you have configured the back-up options, Mozy handles the back-ups and deals with disconnections from the internet by patiently waiting until connectivity has been restored. If you go more than a week without a back-up, however, it can be set to give you a warning.

The price for Mozy is very competitive. The charge is $5/month for up to 30 gigabytes of storage. For me, this works out to about $0.23 per gigabyte used per month. The chart above shows how this compares to other storage providers, including Amzaon.com’s S3 service.

While I did test out Jungle Disk, a storage solution based on S3 with very low costs, the software did not enable any smooth back-up and did not work with my Tivoli Storage Manager back-up tool. I also found it somewhat unreliable and intolerant of connectivity interruptions.

One area where I did run into trouble, however, is the backing up of several very large files I have. Some applications, like Microsoft Outlook, create big files and modify them every day. My mail file is 600 megabytes and continuously backing it up is going to clog up any system. I would like to see an option for selecting certain specific files only for periodic back-up – e.g. once a week. This could cut down on unnecessary network traffic.

Overall, Mozy is the best backup solution I have tried and has the honor of being the first online storage service I won’t be canceling anytime soon.