With a library of over 700,000 files on my computer (most of them being family photos and videos), backup is an absolute must for me. I've seen too many people lose precious memories when a hard drive failed all because they didn't have them backed up anywhere. My first line of defense is an external hard drive set to back up once a day. But even that is not good enough for me. I am a worst-case-scenario kind of person and always fear the day that some freak electrical surge fries all the hard drives in my house. So I redundantly backup all my data on a secure online storage site.
For years I have used Mozy (www.mozy.com). It is a great service. It's easy and straightforward. Download an app to your computer, choose the files you want to backup, set a schedule, and forget about it. The initial backup takes quite awhile depending on the number of files, but once it's done, the daily incremental backups take only a few minutes. And I set them to occur at 2am when nobody would be online at my house hogging all the bandwidth. When I signed up for the service, it cost $50 per year for UNLIMITED storage. A small price to pay for so much peace of mind. Plus with over 1 Terrabyte (1000 GB) of data to backup, it was a bargain.
Recently I received an email from Mozy that their pricing structure was going to be changing. I went to their website to figure out how much it was going to cost moving forward. Now they charge based on how many GB you have uploaded. It now costs $110 for the first 125 GB of data per year and $2 for each additional 20 GB per month. Based on the amount of storage I need from Mozy, it will now cost me a whopping $2,400 per year. That is just insane.
Needless to say I immediately started looking for a new solution. I found Backblaze (www.backblaze.com) which was getting good reviews online. It works exactly like Mozy. It's also just as easy and straightforward. The best part is it was still only $50 per year for unlimited storage (and with an online coupon code I saved an additional $5). I purchased it and started backing up right away. Initial backup took about 2 weeks because of the amount of data I had. But now it's done and I can cancel my Mozy account.
I have nothing bad to say about the Mozy service. It is a good online storage solution and works exactly as promised. But I think Mozy made a big mistake changing their pricing structure so drastically. They have lost me as a customer and from what I read on Twitter, they are losing a lot of other customers too. That's why, right now, Backblaze is the best Mac-compatible online storage solution available.
