i was thinking about this very thing this morning. My bet is that the vast majority of users use far less than you. Sort of like a long tail in reverse. With all of Mozy's users taken into account, the costs even out. - Roberto Bonini

Glen: whats your upload bandwidth like?? - Roberto Bonini

I'm not sure that's such a big catch. I've got uVerse fiber service which seems pretty fast. Even if it took a long time, as long as it was being done in the background and not disruptive it would seem possible to do. So I'd likely be unprofitable for Mozy but maybe a necessary unprofitability in order for them to market unlimited storage to more profitable accounts? I wonder if there is any fine print or anything where they'd renege on the unlimited storage offer. - Thomas Hawk

I wonder if I'd somehow be throttled by Mozy or AT&T if I tried to send them 12TB of data. - Thomas Hawk

I have 2.5Tb here. if i could fill up a few hard drives and send it to them, it would make much more sense. - Roberto Bonini

It would seem to make more sense initially to send hard drives in the mail like that to them Roberto, but I don't see mailing hard drives as an option with them. I don't think the service was designed with people like me in mind though so I'm wondering if it would be a pain in the ass to try and use it. Does anyone using it know how it works? Do you have to manually initiate uploads or can I just designate a hard drive and have it synch. It says $60 per year per computer, but does that include an unlimited amount of drobos connected up to the computer as well? - Thomas Hawk

does it synch folders, so if I move stuff around on primary storage will it also move it around in the cloud? - Thomas Hawk

Thomas: yeah, thats what I meant. Initially. Glen: Not bad. :) - Roberto Bonini

Unlimited accounts are for 'personal' use only. MozyPro is for business/commercial user: * Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month. * Server Licenses: $6.95 + $0.50/GB per month. MozyHome, in the Terms, they don't seem to have any fine print that limits your storage, however they (of course) reserve the right to change their terms at any time. - Joel Tanner

Mine would be personal use... I think I might actually try it. It would be interesting to see how it went. Since I've got more personal storage than 99.999% of the people out there if they could do a good job with my stuff they could probably handle just about anyone. I suspect it might not go as smoothly for me though. Will have to give the idea some thought this week. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas - you might be interested in this thread: http://friendfeed.com/bluecoc... I have half a terrabyte on Mozy now. The "catch" is that you pretty much always have to have that box connected because if you accidentally sync when it's not connected it will mark the files as "deleted". They'll "come back" when you sync again but the process could take days (or in your case weeks). And if you quit syncing for a couple of weeks and then come back you might end up having to upload a bunch of stuff again. - Lindsay

it'd be much better to simply buy a new HDD every so often, fill it with a nice backup and send it off to an offsite data storage house. Have the HDD's in a rotation so that you get some of them back every month and you can plop them into a HDD caddy, check they're ok and update that backup. - alphaxion

Lindsey, that's a good thread. Thanks for sharing that. I forgot about that one of yours. It seems like maybe it's not as easy as one might think. Still I think I might check it out. $60 per year seems cheap. Assuming it doesn't hurt the performance on the machine. I really only use my Dell for storage and as a media center PC and do everything else on my Mac. It might make for a few interesting blog posts on the service if nothing else. - Thomas Hawk

Right now I do have drobos which replicate data and many of my files and offsite hard drives with family/friends with many of my images and music. I also have 30,000+ of my finished images stored on Flickr/Zooomr, etc. But my RAW files are not backed up as well as they should be right now and maybe Mozy could be just one more leg of a backup strategy. - Thomas Hawk

Thats for reminding me of that thread lindsay. Thomas: SmugVault?? - Roberto Bonini

I looked at smugvault when it first launched, and it was insanely expensive, at least it would have been for my storage needs. Best I could tell they were simply remarketing S1 and marking it up. I might be wrong though and maybe should revisit it. Do they let you store unlimited data for $60 per year though? - Thomas Hawk from iPhone

No, SmugVault charges S3 rates plus markup, as I recall. - Tristan Seligmann

Prices here: http://www.smugmug.com/price... Quick back of the envelope calculation. My 150gb's multiplied by 22 cents (0.22) = $33 plus $1 recurring charge = $34. - Roberto Bonini

I have backups on S3, but I'm selective because of price per GB per month. I also wanted a flat rate strategy to get virtually all my files without having to think too much about it. I recently tried backblaze and I'm sticking with it (for a year at least). Here's their policy on external hard drives: https://www.backblaze.com/edrive... . One thing that attracted me was that apparently Mac support was not an afterthought or second class citizen, speaking of which I liked this blog post of theirs: http://blog.backblaze.com/2008... . Their openness became even more apparent with their petabyte storage hardware designs they open sourced: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009... . You can't put everything just on good corporate citizenship, but it does matter. It's early, and just my 2 cents, but there you go. - Micah

I think it would cost me over $2,000 per year to store all of my data at SmugVault. Too expensive. Especially when compared to $60 per year from Mozy. Backblaze is $60 per year as well for unlimited it looks like. I wonder which is better Mozy or Backblaze. - Thomas Hawk

It takes you a year to update a few gigs to Mozy, so 12TB would take a lifetime. - Mike Reynolds

hmmmm.. that's good to know Mike. A year for a few gigs? I wonder if that's at slow upload speeds or if the problem is more on Mozy's end. - Thomas Hawk

No it doesn't take a year... I uploaded about 250GB in 3-4 weeks (running in idle time when I wasn't home)... I have almost 500GB up there now... One thing to keep in mind though: I have had some issues on my box recently (freezing, locking up... not responding to anything but reboot) and have suspected it had something to do with the Mozy client. I haven't been able to pinpoint the culprit yet, but considering the stuff I had running when these issues happen it's a likely candidate. - Lindsay

It doesn't "take a year to update a few gigs to Mozy" was the point I was refuting. Yes, Thomas has significantly more data to backup than I do or most people do, so it probably would take him a long time, most likely about as long as you derived, Glen. - Lindsay

Nice to see some good comments for Backblaze; I have been leaning towards that service, but have also been reading up on two others: Livedrive ( https://signup.livedrive.com/ ) and CrashPlan ( http://www5.crashplan.com/consume... ). Livedrive looks really promising, despite it's higher cost. The FB, Flickr & SmugMug aspects of Livedrive, as well as file sync ability, are what intrigue me the most. With CrashPlan Central, you get online backup as well as coordinated local or offsite backups to other available HDs. After reading of Lindsay's Mozy headaches a few weeks back, I have been reading up on the others and these three have caught my eye. - JA Castillo

I left Mozy for Backblaze. Mozy was slow, it was difficult to see a file status, and I did have trouble with the connection. Backblaze also has unlimited storage at $5 month. Their UI is superior to Mozy and it backs up app data. - Russellreno

Russell did you find that Backblaze transferred files faster than Mozy did? - Thomas Hawk

The big gotcha at Backblaze is the high cost to recover files. It seems to me both services will only back up files on one drive, and will not find networked drives. - Russellreno

I didn't really notice a difference in transfer speed but I did not have a good comparison either. I did use Mozy with UVerse. Mozy might throttle the transfer speed. I suggest you do a trial with Mozy for one week then Backblaze for a week. That order would allow BB to continue after one week because I think you will like to better. Check the cost of recovery for both services. - Russellreno

@Russellreno - Mozy backs up data on more than one drive... I have it backing up data on 4 different drives on one computer. They're not network drives but 3 are external. - Lindsay

Mozy uses EMC's Avamar as it's back-end. Avamar employs data de-duplication at the bit level and can definitely find commonality even in compressed images -- most certainly RAW. 2 of these just reduced our backup time majorly and turned 5-6 hour backup jobs into under an hour at the most after the initial backup. - Shmoe

I love Backblaze. They also backup external drives - anything it sees as a networked drive on your system. As far as the cost to recover all the data in the event of a full system crash, yea, I'd rather pay anyone to get DVDs shipped out than to wait for 12 TB of data to come back down the pipe. - Criz

I'm all for backblaze.com, Criz (see my comment above) but as far as I understand it, backblaze allows firewire/usb connected drives but not NAS devices - "Network (NAS) drives, remotely mounted computers or volumes, or shared volumes do not get backed up." - Micah

hmmm.. seems like folks like backblaze more than Mozy. May have to give them the first shot. - Thomas Hawk

How do you manage this now? - ThinkEzy

May I just ask how you manage that massive amount of Data for photos and music? I've got like 200 GB on stuff and always have issues with the managing.. - Jaap Willem

i'm thinking of trying BackBlaze for the long fact I have various machines. - Edgar Rodríguez

The service is good. I once thought it had lost everything bit I reinstalled the app and it recognised the stuff it had already done. You can start and stop a any time and it remembers. Inthe day when lightroom was flaky I got a fair few backups from Mozy. Check how much it would cost to ship that back to you though; might fill a few DVDs. Obviusly web restore is free but 12tb might take a while. Tey reently removed the upload bandwidth cap so it's only limited to your upstream and your ISP's TOS. It take me about a day to upload 8GB; if I did it from th office it would be quicker! Lord knows how it handles moved files though, might try that out! - Phill Price from iPhone

Phil: A moved file isn't uploaded the second time. BB just changes the directory. That was another selling point for me. - Russellreno

Personally, Comcast caps me at 250 GB a month. So that's a minimum of four months just to upload my photos. Then, should I ever need to recover, another four months to get it back. It's a great concept, but backing up to the cloud just isn't viable for large amounts of data. Currently I shuffle external hard drives back and forth to my desk at work. - Eric P

Thomas, you can always be pro-active about your doubts -- tell them and offer to give them an endorsement if you *are* happy in the end. Your concerns are justified, and I think they'll appreciate them and at least be straight with you as to whether they can afford your business :) - Richard Walker

Russell - I'm using Mozy not backblaze - but thanks - Phill Price

Just a note regarding NAS and the various backup services: you might be able to get around the NAS problem if your NAS supports iSCSI. iSCSI presents a block-device off of your NAS, so, your backup service may see it as though it were any other physical/block-device. Down side is, generally, your NAS isn't going to support multi-host simultanesous write access to a chunk of storage presented via iSCSI. - Thomas Jones