Goodbye Carbonite, Hello Mozy

[Rob Alexander]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Yeah, I forgot to mention that I had a series of problems with Carbonite chewing up 90% of my dual-core CPU cycles, and I spent a month working with their tech support before I just gave up.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that one. About once every two weeks or so, everything would slow to a crawl. I'd look in task manager and Carbonite would be taking up over 50% of my CPU cycles. No setting would affect it (e.g. pausing it or even disabling it). The only thing I could do was to end the process directly. The process would restart itself immediately, but it would then behave for a while.

[Rob Alexander]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Yeah, I forgot to mention that I had a series of problems with Carbonite chewing up 90% of my dual-core CPU cycles, and I spent a month working with their tech support before I just gave up.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that one. About once every two weeks or so, everything would slow to a crawl. I'd look in task manager and Carbonite would be taking up over 50% of my CPU cycles. No setting would affect it (e.g. pausing it or even disabling it). The only thing I could do was to end the process directly. The process would restart itself immediately, but it would then behave for a while.

[Rob Alexander]

Originally Posted by Damion Chaplin

So, I've always wondered: is 'carbonite' a reference to Star Wars? Like you're data's as safe as a hibernating Han Solo?

Yeah, and look how safe that turned out to be!

[Ed Hansberry]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Yeah, I forgot to mention that I had a series of problems with Carbonite chewing up 90% of my dual-core CPU cycles, and I spent a month working with their tech support before I just gave up.

Yup, had the same issue. I sent them a log and they wanted me to disable the backup in several folders that had a lot of activity. Nevermind that there was, well, you know, DATA in those folders I needed to have backed up.

[theon]

When I saw this thread I immediately went to the site and downloaded the free 2GB version to test out.

Unfortunately Mozy doesn't seem to back up network drives which is where I store most of my shared data. Any solution similar to Mozy that can take in network drives as well that anyone knows about?

[SQLDba]

My biggest complaint w/ both Mozy and Carbonite is that you have to have separate accounts for each computer you have - so that $3.89 becomes $10+ when you are backing up your work computer, home machine, wife's laptop etc.

It seems to me that there should be a "power user" or family license - maybe $7.50 a month that would let you add more than one computer to your account.

I've been using Jungle Disk - a $20 one time purchase application - that works on Windows, Linux and Mac - and gives you unlimited space and unlimited machines to access that space. They use Amazon S3 for storing your data - and so you pay a small monthly fee for bandwidth usage and montly storage. That first upload of all your data can be pricey (couple bucks) but after that - the bandwidth charge is nominal. Biggest problem w/ Jungle Disk is that there is a clear tipping point where the flat rate pricing of a Mozy / Carbonite becomes cheaper. But otherwise I've been very happy.

The other nice feature about Jungle Disk as that there is an ability to create a mapping to your disk as a network drive (J: by default) so you can get a little more funcational use out of it than just for offline storage.

[onlydarksets]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Hmm. Was this a long time ago? I tried a restore just yesterday, and it was as simple as going into My Computer, browsing to the Mozy drive, finding the file I wanted, and clicking restore. Sending an unencrypted ZIP file is definitely not the normal way of doing things..

That's for remote file access, which is something they tout as a "feature". No thanks. If I need remote access, I want a web interface where I can just download the file.

Carbonite and Mozy are pretty much fungible (unless you have a Mac, of course) - over time, you will find things about Mozy that don't meet your requirements, as well. Now, if their customer service is more responsive, then that could be a differentiator, but we are the small minority of their customer base (users backing up 100GB+), so there will always be something, since they are developing their product for the masses.

I'm on Carbonite (since your original article), and I have no plans to switch (just renewed, thanks to this reminder!). I am not looking forward to another 2-week backup...

[onlydarksets]

Originally Posted by SQLDba

My biggest complaint w/ both Mozy and Carbonite is that you have to have separate accounts for each computer you have - so that $3.89 becomes $10+ when you are backing up your work computer, home machine, wife's laptop etc.

It seems to me that there should be a "power user" or family license - maybe $7.50 a month that would let you add more than one computer to your account.

I sync all of my machines to the HTPC, and then run Carbonite on the HTPC. So, I get a local backup and an off-site backup and I'm only paying for one machine. Foldershare makes it transparent.

[Omegajb]

Originally Posted by onlydarksets

That's for remote file access, which is something they tout as a "feature". No thanks. If I need remote access, I want a web interface where I can just download the file.

***long quote trimmed by mod JD***

That's right, it was remote access which is a cool feature but not secure. The thing about Carbonite that stunk was how it backed up PST files, it looks like it has to backup the entire PST everytime it changes.
I don't remember how Mozy is doing it.

[onlydarksets]

I'm sure Mozy is the same, unless it does incremental file backups (which I seriously doubt, although I have no direct information). I use Exchange, so that's my backup. My archive PST rarely changes, so I can stomach the once-in-a-blue-moon 500MB backup.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by theon

Unfortunately Mozy doesn't seem to back up network drives which is where I store most of my shared data. Any solution similar to Mozy that can take in network drives as well that anyone knows about?

Yeah, that's not that uncommon for services like this - for $5 a month (or less) they have to set some limits on the backup. Even when they use the word "unlimited" they know that for most users that means a finite amount of data on a local hard drive. If they allowed backing up of network drives, which is something the average consumer doesn't have or even understand, they'd really be offering network-wide backup...and I don't think any company could be profitable allowing that.

My advice? Re-architect how you do things...push the files on the network drive back down to one computer using FolderShare or another sync program, get all your data onto a single computer, then use Mozy to back up that computer. That's what I do, and it works extremely well. Mozy allows you to back up external hard drives, which is pretty cool - last I checked, Carbonite does not.