Mozy’s unlimited cloud backup service is decidedly less unlimited today. As the company has retired it’s $4.95 plan in favor of new tiers of service (shown above) with data overages running $2/month per 20GB. While quite a few seemed riled up, I don’t particularly mind. Mozy needs to make money and it’s easy to see how the top few percent of users could impact the bottom line. A Mozy VP responds on CNET:
We do not take this on lightly…I don’t expect everybody to be happy about it. But if they take a look at what we’re doing and why, it’ll at least be understandable.
As I told photographer Thomas Hawk, you generally get what you pay for. And Mozy is owned by industry giant EMC… something I take comfort in. I’d say they’re much less likely to lose his data than Flickr – a photo sharing service that operates without a backup or un-delete option. There continues to be an unreasonable expectation that everything on the Internet be free or inexpensive. The sooner we collectively get beyond that, the sooner we’ll have higher quality services and support.
As for me, I recently put Mom on Mozy to ensure her documents and iTunes are backed up. But I’ve been rethinking my (her) strategy after reader Daniel B. encouraged me to take another look at CrashPlan. Instead of her backing up to Mozy’s cloud, by using CrashPlan, her files in Florida could be copied here in Virginia onto my gear. Given I’d be the one handling restoration duties, it’d make sense to have that data local where I can verify at will and restore as needed.
ZNF is backed up and secured by VaultPress ($40/month) and it’s become very clear to me that the expense of these services probably isn’t actually the data transfer and storage but, rather, funding the humans who design and support the solution. Related to ZNF, I have untapped bandwidth and storage via my provider (MediaTemple) that I’ve been meaning to leverage to back up my digital photos to the (my) cloud.