Here’s a thought for everyone desperate to move to “the cloud”. Once you have all your data in one providers cloud, how easy will it be to switch providers? What will you do if they increase the cost 1620%?
I posted a little while ago about how well Mozy.com worked to backup your data, and the fact that they were ~$50/year for unlimited storage.
However, in an email last week Mozy informed their users that their terms of service/payment structure was changing (again, last time was May 2010), eliminating the unlimited plan. It’s now $5.99/mo for 50GB and an additional $2/20GB extra.
The most interesting part is existing users cannot extend their current plan, so anyone with lots of data backed up whose contract will expire soon will be pretty screwed (a 200GB user would now need to start paying $21/mo or lose all of their existing backups).
In my case if I don’t start paying $86/month I’ll lose my online backups. If I want to switch providers it will take another 2.5 months (assuming I switch back to Charter internet at an additional $50/mo) to copy all the data up to the new provider.
My questions to Mozy: you’re giving users no time to plan for the change, I assume to take advantage of their locked-in state. But how do your users know you won’t just change again in a few months? You appear to change plans every 10 months or so, restricting features and space while increasing costs. Can your customers assume that pattern will continue?
I will not be using Mozy after my unlimited plan expires in October ’11.
New conclusion: Mozy is a consideration if you have <50GB (note that Windows 7 + Office 2010 approaches 20GB) and a very fast internet connection. However there are several Mozy competitors you may want to look at including some that still offer “unlimited” backups.
A quick google turns up these possible options, I’ll let you know what I end up with.
www.sosonlinebackup.com
www.backblaze.com
www.carbonite.com
www.livedrive.com
www.elephantdrive.com
www.crashplan.com
www.jottabackup.com
www.jungledisk.com
www.constantvault.com
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