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Mozy is one of the most popular backup services available, and used to offer a generous unlimited data storage limit until early 2011 when they ceased the offer. Despite that Mozy still offers a competitive 50Gb data storage for a mere $5.99 per month.
Firstly mozy is a bit different to the other providers in that it doesn’t offer automatic synchronisation services so, it’s much suited for created real backups online. One of the problems associated with offering full synchronisation services is that data is continually accessed and written over, which makes it more prone to corruption.
For many this in itself will be a drawback because it’s no easy nor simple to share you data between your computers with ease, you have to manually download files from the server in order to update a different computer with the latest version of a file.
Unlike other services mozy doesn’t have the iphone/smartphone access that we’d like to see, for instance, SugarSync allows you to use an iphone up to log into your SugarSync account and manage them by downloading them onto your smart phone or emailing them to yourself so you can send them to a colleague or a friend. This is handy if you’re away from your computer but you still need to send files to third parties.
It has an easy set and forget option where you can select which folders you would like to get backed up and then set a frequency on how often you would like the file to be uploaded onto the server, after which, all backups are done automatically. This is useful, however this comes as standard with most automatic backup services.
The bandwidth throttling feature allows you to set a level of resource use for Mozy, you can set up Mozy to back up during certain times when you are not using the internet, or you can set the level of priority for mozy’s internet bandwidth use. Whether you would like it to take precedent over your normal internet use, or whether you would like it to be as unobtrusive as possible.
Mozy uses 256-bit AES-key and 448-bit Blowfish encryption technologies, which is the same technology used by many online banks, this is highly secure and would make any theft of data utterly meaningless as it would take an incomprehensible amount of time for hackers to decrypt, to illustrate, a 64bit encryption allows for around 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible matches for each byte of data, and will take an average computer 58,494 Years to decypt. Now you may be asking how long will it take to break a 256bit encryption? Well the answer is unknown, because as more bits are used for encryption the range of possibilties grow exponentially rather than in a linear fashion. Suffice to say the encryption is highly secure and practically unbreakable. The downside is though that unlike services like Idrive which all you to set your own encryption key, Mozy sets and amanges the key itself, reason being when you forget your encryption key, there simply isn’t a way to recover it. To prevent customers from losing their keys, Mozy decided to take full management of it.
Mozy is one of the easiest backup providers to use, and we’ve hand no problems using it, it’s designed for complete novices in mind, it’s actually too simple to a fault as the feature set isn’t great, and after a while you can’t help but wish for much advanced features.