just wanted to show this to you guys if you haven't already seen it. probably one of the best web products i've ever seen.

http://www.mozy.com/

Quote :

"Mozy is a simple, smart and economic way to protect your data. You simply install it on your PC, set it up and then never worry about data loss again. Specifically, Mozy: * Is simple to set up * Performs backups automatically in the background * Encrypts all files on your PC before transfer * Performs incremental backups * Backs up only blocks that have changed * Backs up open/locked files "

2GB completely free, $4.95/month per computer for UNLIMITED backup (and yeah, it's really unlimited - my 500GB data drive is almost done backing up). The support is great too. Works on Windows and Mac (the Mac client is in beta, but it's working fine for me).

Anyone else use this?

4/17/2007 2:09:28 AM

i use the free version and i love it, the program is small and its easy to set up

4/17/2007 2:15:27 AM

https://mozy.com/?ref=368UQM

For every person that clicks on that link and starts using Mozy*, you'll both get another 256MB of free backup space. That's right, you get extra space, and so do they. That's 1GB of free space for every four people! (We have powerful computers here that can do that sort of math.) For a limited time, there is no limit on the free space you can get.

HOLLA!

4/17/2007 9:15:23 AM

^i'd rather pay $4.95/computer for both of my computers than refer 3985349068 people. :\

4/17/2007 10:52:12 AM

ok

4/17/2007 11:38:05 AM

Unlimited backup..... I should buy a subscription for my work computer and drop about 40 TB on their servers.

4/17/2007 12:23:25 PM

i've almost got 1TB on there so far.

4/17/2007 4:27:35 PM

so you're uploading the entire contents of hard drive to some website?

sounds like an excellent idea

4/17/2007 4:47:17 PM

Quote :

"so you're uploading the entire contents of hard drive to some website? sounds like an excellent idea"

ftw

4/17/2007 7:14:44 PM

448 bit blowfish encryption, and you choose your own key. it's pretty damn secure.

4/17/2007 7:48:18 PM

i wouldn't be worried about upload security as much as i would be about who the fuck i'm sending my hard drive to

[Edited on April 17, 2007 at 8:50 PM. Reason : ]

4/17/2007 8:48:19 PM

You know once it gets there it's still encrypted, right?

4/17/2007 8:52:06 PM

where do they keep the key?

4/17/2007 9:18:57 PM

oic

still seems shady

4/17/2007 9:25:40 PM

you keep the key, they never see it.

i know the guys that run it, and there ain't nothing shady going on here. that's the way they designed it - it's encrypted on your computer with your key, then sent over a SSL link to their servers.

4/17/2007 9:48:25 PM

Don't take ^'s word for it...

http://mozy.com/blog/2006/07/06/chinese-bluegenes

4/18/2007 6:04:05 PM

Quote :

"Luckily, we don’t have to figure all this out from scratch - here at Mozy we use the open_ssl implementation of Blowfish to encrypt everything. And since it’s open source, it’s subject to the scrutiny of the ever-vigilant tin-foil hat crowd. We’re a little unique here in that we give our users the option to provide their own private key (a passphrase, a picture, a music file – whatever) which is hashed to generate a 448-bit key for encryption. This key is stored on their PC, and we don’t have access to it – it’s stored on the PC and is never transferred to our servers – which means that we can confidently protect data from both kid sisters and government agencies. To help explain how strong the encryption is, let’s consider if you were to brute force an attack on the data encrypted on the Mozy servers. You’d have to consider 2448 different keys, which is a lot of keys (the numbers of atoms in the universe is estimated to be somewhere around 277 or so.)"

[Edited on April 18, 2007 at 6:24 PM. Reason : ee]

4/18/2007 6:22:54 PM

i just paid my $5 to try it out, def better than any other backup solution I have tried so far

4/18/2007 10:06:05 PM

I appreciate how evan isn't whoring for referrals

4/18/2007 10:07:12 PM

^thx

4/19/2007 1:15:14 AM

Indeed, referral whores are lower than low. Almost as bad as that guy who advertised his awful rap music in every freaking forum. I appreciate the link by the way, I've been looking for a decent backup service to recommend to people who don't want to trust an external harddrive (makes sense if you're worried about fire, drive failure, power surges, etc.)

Anything's better than that campus backup shit that some jerk out if the IRC staff advertised to incoming students this year. They even sent out the adverts on freaking university letterhead in the guise of an official recommendation from the university. Wish they gave us enough unity space to do this internally with IT here though.

[Edited on April 19, 2007 at 1:35 AM. Reason : ]

4/19/2007 1:32:33 AM

https://www.cgibin.ncsu.edu/it/forms/locker_app.html

4/19/2007 2:45:19 AM

Yeah, I was more thinking increasing the maximum FREE allowable unity locker size.

4/19/2007 3:30:29 AM

bump per user request

9/26/2008 7:54:03 AM

i paid for it and i'm disappointed

granted, i'm trying to back up 1.2 TB of data but it takes forever to do that - i've started it whenever i've had a chance and it's only uploaded like 10gb so far

i thought it'd be easier than buying a terabyte hard drive and a little more peace of mind but it's a real hassle. i don't think it's mozy - just online backups in general i guess. not meant for me

9/26/2008 12:38:26 PM

you can mostly attribute that to the ridiculously slow upload limits our ISPs have

Normal RR is capped at what.... 512Kbps up?
Even if you got the entire 512Kbps the entire time (which 1) you wouldn't, and 2) would effectively shut down the rest of your internet usage), it would take almost 220 days to upload that much data.

[Edited on September 26, 2008 at 1:42 PM. Reason : .]

9/26/2008 1:37:40 PM

Big question i think you shoudl investigate.

Have you tried to restore data? You don't have backups of anythign until you can restore something. I would defiantly give it a try.

9/26/2008 4:39:47 PM

defiantly!

9/26/2008 4:46:40 PM

ive restored stuff from mozy several times. it works great, but is a little slow.

Don't expect to get 1TB uploaded quickly, and you can thank your ISP for that. I've got about 400GB backed up, and the first initial backup of about 250GB took several weeks. Once the initial backup is done the incremental backups are quite speedy. I have mine do a nightly backup at around 3:30am. It's usually finished by the time I wake up.

9/26/2008 5:14:20 PM

my main question is how is mozy going to stay profitable?

amazon s3 charges $0.15 per gb/month of storage. they also charge for bandwidth back and forth, but let's just focus in that storage charge by itself.

If mozy paid the same rate, that would only allow you to back up 33 gigs of data for the $4.95 a month.

Say they're getting a great deal, and only have to pay around $0.05 per gb/month of storage. That's still only 99gb to get you to your $4.95 a month.

Are they going to be making tons more money off of corporate users? Are they hoping most people will back up less than 100gb? Even medium to low end computers come with over 100gb of storage now, so I can easily see most users wanting more than 100, and we've had people in this thread say they were using 500gb-1tb


how can they stay profitable?

has anyone ever used any other online backup services? carbonite, elephant drive, jungle disk?

9/26/2008 5:42:50 PM

They make their money from Mozy Pro and Enterprise. I use it at work on all our sales laptops. Centralized administration and easy as hell to manage. Right now we pay $165/month for 28 users and 115GB of space. It's pay per user/gig on the Pro version. Still a great deal.

9/26/2008 11:17:15 PM