Why you should avoid Mozy

I've been using Mozy for months. I've really liked - nice and easy to use. That is, until my laptop's drive died - blitzing the OS. No problem, it's all backed up on Mozy... well no. So laptop fixed, time for a backup. Here's where the rub is.

While Mozy has a nice (if pretty slow) client for doiing backups. Restores are a completely different animal. With restores where your computer has crashed, you have only 2 options:

• Web Restore - This is where they generate some files containing your data. The files are split into around 500Mb chunks. For 40Gb of data I had stored, that's 80 files. Which you have to download manually. That's right manually - and they aren't faster to download than they were to upload. So for some reason you have a client to upload your files, but you have to download manually. This is completely shit and for this reason alone it's worth chucking Mozy.
  
• DVD Restore - for about $80 I can get a set of DVD's containing my data. Well if I lived in the US I could. Not available internationally.
  

OK 80 files to download in 7 days. But it takes about 60 minutes to download one file - that's right. 60 minutes. So if I sit continually downloading, not sleeping I can just about get this finished in 3.5 days. That's without sleep and I better get it done in 7 days - cos that's when the files expire and I have to do the whole process again.

OK - so I have no choice - I need my data, but just in case I was tempted to stay with Mozy (and look forward to future days of downloading should my laptop ever decide to die again), you should be aware, that after spending days to get your own data back, it's not like you can just restore the data and your back where you were before the crash. No, no, no - you have go through the whole backup procedure again. That's right, weeks of uploading - just to get back to where you were - because Mozy in their wisdom, forces you to remove your old computer in order to do a restore. It is completely insane.

Use something else.