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Thorough Review of Mozy 2.0 Online Backup Solution

By: Stephen McGovern

Company background
Mozy Backup is the property 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 own head-quarters in Seattle, Washington with other offices in Pleasant Grove, Utah; London, England; Shanghai, China; Montreal, Canada; and Bangalore, India.
Mozy currently has over a million customers and over 50,000 businesses, caring for a total of over 25 petabytes of files – that's 25 thousand terabytes or 25,000,000 gigabytes!

Security Options
MozyPro is a very secure online backup provider. All traffic to and from the Mozy servers is encrypted with 128bit SSL encryption which is the internet standard. Once on the servers your information 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 server security, the data centers use 24 hour 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 earthquake.

Backup Features
Mozy provides block level incremental online backups and can be setup to backup either on a schedule or continuously in the background. In our tests, it took less than thirty minutes to backup two gigabytes of data on a domestic 8mbps DSL line uploading and downloading different 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 easy task to add or remove folders and files to/from the backup profile. The Home editions do not provide backup of network drives however, the Pro and Enterprise editions do. None of the packages give backup of removable media.
The non-home editions – MozyPro and MozyEnterprise – permit online backup solutions for Exchange server, SQL server and LDAP directories such as Active Directory and Lotus Notes.

Restore Options
File restore is by request via the web portal, the desktop program or by right-clicking in a folder and selecting restore. After a restore is requested, the program packages all the files requested into a zip file and emails you when the restore is ready for downloading. File versioning is available on all backed up media, so you can opt to restore an older edition 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 fits in with your needs by allowing you to manage how much CPU and bandwidth are accessible to the program. These can be easily tuned from the desktop application. Proxy servers are also supported and Mozy can be configured 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 provides 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 increased by allowing other people to enrole. For every extra signup you get another 250Mb added to your account.
- There are no limits set on the size or type of individual files.
- There are also no limits on the quantity of data backed up or restored.
- Mozy free allows backup of 2 devices under 1 user account; MozyHome permits upto 5 devices but each additional device will cost $4.95 per month per device.
- Both MozyPro and MozyEnterprise accept infinite 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
MozyHome 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 give FaceBook or similar integration.

Customer Support
Mozy's customer support is commonsense: They supply great user guides, full FAQs and a knowledge- base. There is also a blog and plenty of testimonials and case studies available. Email support is available to all types of accounts, but, phone support is only available to MozyPro and MozyEnterprise users and live chat is not usable to free users.

Usability
MozyHome is really painless to use. You can go from signup to backup in under 5 minutes and it really is a 'set it and forget it' method. MozyPro has a slightly larger learning curve but this is to be expected since it provides lots more features.

Final words
If you are looking for a certain, set-it-and-forget-it answer that does not cost too much, is able to grow or contract to fit in with your requirements and is simple to change then Mozy Online Backup is your perfect solution. If you are wanting to backup Terabytes of data that changes on a regular basis then there are different and cheaper solutions available.

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