To Mozy Or Not To Mozy

I have a lot of media – photographs, video and music.  Some of my media (the home videos and photographs) are very precious and while one can back-up to something like a Windows Home Server, everyone should also consider an off-site back-up solution to ensure critical files are safe even in the event of one’s house burning down (or a burglar making off with that shiny NAS device.)

In December last year I selected Mozy as my ‘back-up in the cloud’ solution.  The Mozy system involves installing a very light piece of software on the Windows machine you wish to be backed up, selecting the directories to be backed up to Mozy‘s servers and leaving it to do its stuff.  After the initial full back-up, further back-ups are incremental.  I have this installed on my Windows 7 Media Center.

Bandwidth consumption is minimal (unless you instruct it to be greedy) and my Media Center didn’t notice the CPU usage.  At the time I placed my order, the amount of space you could use on Mozy‘s servers was limitless (yes, limitless) but more on that later.

After pointing Mozy‘s software at my music and photo collections, the software ground through the 80gb or so of files over the course of a few weeks (due to my settings to only perform back-ups during quiet times.)  Once done, any new files placed in the target folders are backed up within a few hours.

Restoring the files is equally painless.  With the files visible on a virtual drive, retrieval is a snap (or a DVD containing the back-ups can be ordered.)  Going further, it is also simple to retrieve files from up to 30 days in the past to undo some unwanted photo retouching.

So this time a fortnight ago, I would have recommend Mozy to anyone looking for an inexpensive, cloud-based back-up solution.  For £4.99 per month, or £104.79 for 2 years with unlimited back-up storage, what’s not to like? 

However, this week the terms and conditions changed.  Most importantly, the ‘unlimited’ option vanished, to be replaced by tiered pricing.  I only have the US prices in front of me, which are $5.99 per month for 50gb and $9.99 for 120gb, but I have no reason to believe the UK pricing will not follow suit. 

This is a worrying trend.  Yes, there are alternatives, such as Carbonite, which still offer limitless back-up, or one can opt for a different solution such as Tranquil‘s Home Server Sync.  But the issue here is that the cloud is not as infinite as many internet evangelists might have us believe. 

As service providers hunt for business models that work, cloud-based storage may find itself constrained by cost as users seek to store more and more high-definition content in the same way that high-definition internet television is without doubt constrained by the download caps imposed on the majority of UK internet users.

So, just as I can’t see my Media Center being replaced by video-on-demand services in the cloud just yet, it may be time to dust off my copy of Windows Home Server V1 and have a chat with Tranquil about Home Server Sync…