Mozy online backup raises their price dramatically

Mark1 wrote in post #11762402
I cant believe people actually thought they could have unlimited storage forever for just a little cost. It is more than obvious that it is not a sound and sustainable business plan. Its one that was doomed from the start.

Not really. There are still several services still using this plan, including one run by Yahoo. People thought Gmail's 2GB of email was unsustainable, too -- but Google had the foresight to see that hosting costs would be decreasing exponentially and that cloud computing was the future.

The day will come when this little Mozy debacle will be laughed at the same way that we look back and laugh that services like Prodigy used to only allow 30 free emails a month.

pbelarge wrote in post #11762527
I use a lockable fire/water safe for storage of my data/images, and other important stuff. No need to move stuff offsite. These safes are.....well, safe.

I tend to think that it's probably cheaper and much safer just to use a bank's safe deposit box. Those safes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are pretty much atom-bomb-proof.

chakalakasp wrote in post #11762645
Not really. There are still several services still using this plan, including one run by Yahoo.

Yahoo and Google may be exceptions as they make their money other places and can easily cover the loss. But any independent site is only marking time till unlimited is no longer a smart offering.

Mark1 wrote in post #11762869
Yahoo and Google may be exceptions as they make their money other places and can easily cover the loss. But any independent site is only marking time till unlimited is no longer a smart offering.

Perhaps you feel so, but they don't. Right now they're having a feeding frenzy cashing the checks from former Mozy customers.

Buy a couple of large USB hard drives. Back up all your stuff onto both. Store each in a separate external location. Update each one twice a year, staggered.

I do this, and keep a another disk in my car that I update monthly. And finally, I keep a flash drive, encrypted (see TrueCrypt) in my car's ash-tray containing my important stuff, like billing info & Quicken files...

I work with computers for a living, and NEVER want to lose stuff, especially something that I spent my own time creating. I would never pay an online service to store what I could store myself.

In-house safes aren't that smart, because thieves could cart the whole thing away. Firesafes are allowed to let papers become a bit crispy, which is hard on a hard-drive. And fire-safe effectiveness degrades surprisingly quickly over time. Safe Deposit boxes are good, especially if you already have one!

Do yourself a favor and get proper backups cooking, and update them regularly!

I myself have everything I've done since 1987, and NOTHING since before that. The reason why is a sad story!

bvanpelt wrote in post #11763295
Buy a couple of large USB hard drives. Back up all your stuff onto both. Store each in a separate external location. Update each one twice a year, staggered.

I do this, and keep a another disk in my car that I update monthly. And finally, I keep a flash drive, encrypted (see TrueCrypt) in my car's ash-tray containing my important stuff, like billing info & Quicken files...

I work with computers for a living, and NEVER want to lose stuff, especially something that I spent my own time creating. I would never pay an online service to store what I could store myself.

In-house safes aren't that smart, because thieves could cart the whole thing away. Firesafes are allowed to let papers become a bit crispy, which is hard on a hard-drive. And fire-safe effectiveness degrades surprisingly quickly over time. Safe Deposit boxes are good, especially if you already have one!

Do yourself a favor and get proper backups cooking, and update them regularly!

I myself have everything I've done since 1987, and NOTHING since before that. The reason why is a sad story!

I already do proper back ups; in addition to the primary drive, I have a set of DVDs onsite (updated about once a month to add new photos), another set of DVDs in a safe deposit box (also updated) and an external drive in a safe deposit box. Mozy was my sixth sigma, so to speak. I may purchase another hard drive and rotate backups in the safe deposit box, it's just such a hassle to have to constantly go to the bank.

chakalakasp wrote in post #11763340
I already do proper back ups; in addition to the primary drive.

Same here. Mozy was only a convenient offsite backup.

Check out their community. Its going crazy and Mozy are editing and deleting posts faster than people can post them. They are editing out competitor names. I wrote a post and mentioned Cabonite's upload limit of 100 kbit/s if you have more than 200 GB. Seconds after posted that was changed to "a competitor".

chakalakasp wrote in post #11763197
Perhaps you feel so, but they don't. Right now they're having a feeding frenzy cashing the checks from former Mozy customers.

And Mozy was right there with them.... Ooops

Dont get me wrong. It is a fabulous service. But it is stuff like this that keeps me away from any type of cloud solution.

Mark1 wrote in post #11763622
And Mozy was right there with them.... Ooops

Dont get me wrong. It is a fabulous service. But it is stuff like this that keeps me away from any type of cloud solution.

I'm with you there. While I will probably migrate to Crashplan, part of me just wants to get another HD and use it to rotate backups in the safe deposit box. If Crashplan ever kills their unlimited backup offer, I'm probably done with cloud storage until the market stabilizes.

I could use Amazon S3 which is about as stable as anything can be, but at 14 cents per month per gig, it's not affordable to me for a sixth sigma, at least with Unlimited plans out there for less than $5. I'll take a bit of a risk for instability for that kind of discount, considering I already have three sets of backups, two offsite.

This should be helpful in light of the price hike...
http://lifehacker.com …-big-or-unlimited-backups

I dont see it is a market stabilization problem. For me it still is a technology/buisness plan problem. Mozy is only a convienent example.... When they started I highly doubt the plan was to run for a while then throw out a 600% fee increase with out any advanced notice. I will bet it was nothing more then a "how much can somebody really up load?" mistake. When one image can be 25mb and you up load 300 images a day, times who knows how many photographers then add all the video people.... then add in the fact the internet getting faster.... Some one simply didnt realize the volume of data they would actually be storeing. The bad buisness plan part here was they did nothing "till they had to". If they had saw it comming they could have adjusted the priceplan and been OK. Even if the change was only for the new people with current users grandfathered in.

On the technology side... "well its the internet....nuf said". The internet is scarely unreliable. Something as simple as a car wreck at the corner that hit the exchange box.... you could be out if the internet for a week easily.

One thing that sours me as well on the cloud.... This fall I had intermitant internet. It would be fine for hours then it would drop off for hours. I had service men out ,who knows how many times and they could not find the problem. They even came out and burried a brand new cable to my house. Still in and out. All of a sudden the problem went away as fast as it came. They have no idea what was the problem. It was like this for 3 months. Not exactly confidence building.

Also companies get bought and dismanteled, or bought and mothballed, or even bouoght and neutered, at total disreguard to the customer base.

And now that internet access will soon be tied to useage... and capped.... online storeage is all but dead. Canada wants to cap people at 25gig..... a month! --- down from 250gig, and charge the same access fee. Once that goes through it will be about a year before it comes to the US.

I want to be a cloud user. But every time I am ready to give in, something like this happens and keeps me away.

http://www.backblaze.c​om/ $5/m. Unlimited.

Yea, I've been using Mozy for a while now and was totally shocked at the price hike. At the current pricing scale, it would cost me over 500 bucks a year to use them. Yea, no thanks.

Something tells me that they know this and looking to "clean out the closet" by eliminating larger storage users. I believe that those users are no longer part of their demographic.

Because it was way too easy to delete my account with them. Big button stating "Cancel now", with no ... "We hope you reconsider" or selling me other options. They know what they are doing.

This is part of a business model reorganization.

Oh well... Good bye, Mozy.

Expect prices on everything to be going up this year, doesn't really matter what service or product.

Just moved to two Drobo systems, copying the files now. One on site, one off site and then will have an online storage system. PhotoShelter is the best, however, the most expensive ($1000/year for a TB).

MJPhotos24 wrote in post #11784123
Expect prices on everything to be going up this year, doesn't really matter what service or product.

Yeah well that is life and to be expected. But 800% price increase is not normal.


Honestely I am kinda hoping that these 10% of powerusers that they want to get rid of cause so much bad pr that they loose so many of the customers they want to keep that they loose money and eventually have to close.

I do think this is deliberate from them but I think they forgot to take into account that the power users is also users that recommend mozy and help many of the non-power users setting up the service.