Review of Mozy 2.0 Online Backup solution

Company background

Mozy Backup is the brainchild of the Decho Corporation which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the EMC2 Corporation, a fortune 500 company. Decho was founded in 2005. They currently have offices in Seattle, Washington with offices in Pleasant Grove, Utah; London, England; Shanghai, China; Montreal, Canada; and Bangalore, India.
Mozy currently has over 1,000,000 customers and over 50,000 businesses, preserving a total of at least 25 petabytes of data - that's 25,000 terabytes or 25000000 gigabytes!

Features

Security Abilities

MozyPro is a incredibly secure online backup product. All traffic to and from the Mozy servers is encrypted with 128bit SSL encryption which is the internet standard. Once on the servers your data is encrypted with either 448bit Blowfish technology or your own 256bit AES private key encryption. There is currently nothing better than this outside of the military.
As for datacenter security, the data centers implement 24/7/365 on-site monitoring and security, state-of-the-art fire detection and suppression power distribution and seismic safeguards that can withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake.

Backup Abilities

Mozy provides block level incremental online backups and can be organized to backup either on a specific schedule or constantly in the background. In our tests, it took below thirty minutes to backup 2,048 megabytes of data on a home 8mbps DSL line uploading and downloading other data. Also, because of the block level nature of Mozy's backup technology, open or locked files can be backed up easily.
A progress indicator is visible if you click on the icon in the system tray. Initially Mozy Online Backup includes all the current user's profile files including documents, music, videos, etc. However, it is a straight-forward task to add or remove folders and files to/from the backup job. The Home editions do not provide backup of network drives however, the Pro and Enterprise editions do. None of the products provide backup of removable media.
The commercial editions - MozyPro and MozyEnterprise - permit online backup solutions of Exchange server, SQL server and LDAP directories such as Active Directory and Lotus Notes.

Restore Abilities

File restore is by request on the web portal, the desktop application or by right-clicking in a folder and selecting restore. When a restore is requested, the system packages all the files requested into a compressed file and emails you when the restore is ready for collection. File versioning is available on all backed up media, so you can opt to restore an older version of any file you have backed up. Files can be restored to their initial location or to any location of your choosing.

Control and Analysis

MozyPro Online Backup accomodates your needs by allowing you to check how much CPU and bandwidth are accessible to the program. These can be easily adjusted from the desktop application. Proxy servers are also allowed and Mozy can be optimized to use these via the desktop application.
All activity that Mozy carries out is logged and can be examined either from the desktop application or via the web portal.

Interface

MozyPro shows a great deal of information and allows centralized configuration and logging which is ideal when managing backups on PCs and laptops that may not even be in the same country!. Multiple accounts can be setup as well as multiple devices. A more controlled portal is provided with MozyHome.

Device Support

Currently Mozy Online Backup only supports backup of MAC and PC clients. In addition MozyPro backs up MAC And PC servers.

Limitations:

- MozyHome cannot be utilized commercially.
- The basic free account is limited to 2Gb of storage although this can be extended by allowing other people to enrole. For every added signup you get an additional 250Mb of storage.
- There are no limits set on the size or type of individual files.
- There are also no limits on the total amount of data backed up or restored.
- Mozy free allows backup of 2 devices under 1 user account; MozyHome allows upto 5 devices but each additional device will cost $4.95 per month per device.
- Both MozyPro and MozyEnterprise permit limitless devices and users but there is a charge for each device.
- File retention - the amount of time a file remains available for restore after it has been 'deleted' - is 30 days for all account types.

File Sharing and Collaboration

MozyPro is not a file sharing or collaboration tool. It is a backup system. That being said, it does support sign-in, sign-out and multiple levels of security to an individual file level.

Synchronization

You can synchronize many devices.

Web 2.0 Integration

Mozy does not supply FaceBook or similar integration.

Customer Support

Mozy's customer support is commonsense: They provide great user guides, complete FAQs and a knowledgebase. There is also a blog and loads of testimonials and case studies available. Email support is available to all types of accounts, yet, telephone support is only free to MozyPro and MozyEnterprise users and live chat is not ready to free users.

Usability

MozyHome is really uncomplicated to use. You can go from signup to backup in under 5 minutes and it truly is a 'set it and forget it' system. MozyPro has a slightly steeper learning curve but this is understandable since it provides lots more features.

Closing comments

If you are searching for a certain, set-it-and-forget-it answer that is not too expensive, can grow or shrink to adapt to your needs and is a breeze to configure then Mozy Online Backup is your best solution. If you are trying to backup Terabytes of files that changes on a regular basis then there are more appropriate and cheaper solutions available.