Mozy's New Pricing is a Small Price Hike, or a Big Price Hike, or a Price Cut, Depending on How You Look at It
By Harry McCracken | Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 12:50 am
Online backup kingpin Mozy built its business in part on an appealing, cheap-sounding offer: You could back up as much data to the cloud as you wanted for $4.99 a month. On Monday, it announced plans to move to new pricing plans that involve both higher prices and fixed storage limits. But depending on how you use the service, the revised options could cost you a little more or a lot more–or might save you money.
Now there are two MozyHome plans: You can pay $5.99 a month for up to 50GB of backup space for one PC, or $9.99 a month for up to 125GB of space for three PCs. (In both cases, there are discounts if you sign up for a year or two years at a time.) You can add additional computers and/or extra 20GB blocks of storage for $2 a month apiece. For new customers, the pricing takes effect immediately; existing ones get keep the old prices until March 1st, and those who bought service in chunks of a year or more won’t see an increase until their current block of time runs out.
For most Mozy customers, the new pricing works out to a price hike of a buck a month, or twenty percent. For a minority of users who backed up immense amounts of data, it’ll be an increase so huge as to make the service unaffordable, which may be the idea. (Storing a terabyte of data–which some people did–will now cost almost $100 a month.) For anyone who wants to use Mozy with three PCs and can make do with a total of 125GB of space, however, the new pricing is a third cheaper than the old “unlimited” plan, since it would have required three separate $4.99 plans.
Why the change? Mozy says that cheap high-end cameras, smartphones that capture HD video, and other advances have led to average users requiring more and more space and bandwidth, and that a small minority of customers use a lot. The more seriously Mozy subscribers have taken the “unlimited” plan, the less sustainable it’s become.
Doing the math on how this compares to other options is tricky. Symantec’s Norton Online Backup charges $49.99 a year for 25GB of space for up to five computers. That’s less than half of what Mozy charges for its three-PC plan–but Mozy offers five times as much space. In other words, if you own three computers and have a lot of data, Mozy might be your best choice; if you have five computers but don’t need to store all that much, Norton might make more sense.
Then there’s Mozy’s real arch-rival, Carbonite. As of right now, it still charges $54.95 a year for unlimited backups for one computer–versus Mozy’s $65.89 for 50GB. But–as Mozy Chief Marketing Officer Russ Stockdale pointed out to me–Carbonite ratchets down the speed of uploads if you use too much storage. (After 200GB, you can upload only at an excruciating 100-Kbps.) Stockdale told me that Mozy won’t cut the speed of its users’ uploads.
As for syncing services such as Box.net, Dropbox, and SugarSync…well, it’s tough to compare. Their pricing doesn’t bear much resemblance to Mozy’s new offerings, but they’ve got more features, and none of them focus on pure backup. But in making its pricing announcement, Mozy also says that it has plans to help customers “keep files updated between their various computers, enabling them to move fluidly from one computer to another.” That sounds more Dropboxy; Mozy isn’t saying when it’ll roll out such features, though.
So do you use an online storage service? If so, which one–and just how much stuff are you uploading?
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62 Comments For This Post
February 1st, 2011 at 12:57 am
If you're looking for an alternative, Backblaze provides completely unlimited storage for $5/month, backs up all data, backs up external drives, and will even send you a drive if you need to restore data.
We have a free trial at http://www.backblaze.com and are offering ex-mozy customers 10% with coupon "byemozy"
Gleb Budman
CEO, Backblaze
February 1st, 2011 at 11:35 am
I'm a happy Backblaze customer and I'd like to vouch for the service. Mozy users should definitely take note.
February 1st, 2011 at 9:49 pm
Just signed up very easy..thx
February 2nd, 2011 at 7:19 am
I had Mozy for almost a year and absolutely hated the service. I have a Mac and it would bring it to a grinding halt almost daily during the backup process. I would try to get support and they would reply with generic support responses. I am typically patient, but honestly, this is one of the worst software providers I have ever worked with. I swapped to backblaze and literally have had no interaction with the software and it just does it's thing. It also backs up at a much faster speed than Mozy ever did. I would HIGHLY recommend looking towards backblaze, especially considering this most recent decision.
February 3rd, 2011 at 11:31 am
Gleb, what assurances do we have that Backblaze will not follow suit in a year?
March 8th, 2011 at 12:12 pm
switching from Mozy to backblaze NOW !!
January 4th, 2012 at 5:04 am
That is actually pretty interesting, thanks will check it out.
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February 1st, 2011 at 3:49 am
I'm using Mozy and Dropbox. I have MozyHome for almost 2 year and the renewal is comming up in a couple of months. Dropbox is great for synching between computers en other users, I'm using the free service Dropbox provides. Because of the friend program I have 4,75 GB of space on my dropbox. I'm only using 5-10 % of it at the moment.
I love both services. I'm not really happy with the price increase, but I understand why they did it. I hope that Mozy will also create a year or two-year subscription for a few $$ less.
February 1st, 2011 at 3:51 am
Oh, and I have 26 GB of data on Mozy servers. Mostly (90%) pictures going back 8-10 years.
February 1st, 2011 at 5:47 am
Last night we announced a special Mozy Switcher deal – 15% off any CrashPlan subscription – available here http://www.crashplan.com/mozyonover
We are happy to continue to offer true unlimited online backup for the lowest prices around.
Mike Evangelist
Code 42 Software
February 1st, 2011 at 6:12 am
I'm guessing there was some painful, back room hand-wringing prior to this decision. Harry is right. The calculations on whether this is more or less expensive depend on your usage. However, many consumers will simply see this as Mozy reneging on their promise of unlimited storage.
I'm tempted to agree that other providers will follow suit, but only after a period where they see if Mozy's change has any impact on their acquisition rates (I'm mostly referring to Carbonite here).
February 1st, 2011 at 6:54 am
I've been a Mozy customer for years, but it looks like this change is going to cause me to slip through their tightening grip. I'm at 54GB of data, and I'm not about to pay twice the price for a 4GB difference. I'm also principally against omitting pictures and docs from my backups just to meet this cap. The "three computers" thing doesn't interest me, because in our house we consolidate our important docs and pictures to one computer – so goodbye Mozy.
February 1st, 2011 at 7:34 am
If Mozy were raising its price because of significant improvements in its offering or in its service, it would be reasonable. However, their customer "support" (primarily live chat) has been outsourced and is dreadful. I had to wait two hours for an agent to become available. Based on how quickly I progressed through the queue, my guess is that they have one person in chat. It took me THREE weeks to get all of my data back from a crashed hard drive. When my Mozy subscription expires, I'm going to a new provider. Candidly, the online backup system is losing appeal. Our local Internet upload speed is 384K, which makes online backup almost unusable.
February 1st, 2011 at 7:53 am
The problem I have here is "If you have an unlimited package with Mosy the unlimited will remain until the end of your billing cycle where it will then revert to a paid pricing structure depending on the amount of data you are storing." So a 1TB backup will now cost about $100 per month.
February 1st, 2011 at 7:55 am
The problem I have here is "If you have an unlimited package with Mosy the unlimited will remain until the end of your billing cycle where it will then revert to a paid pricing structure depending on the amount of data you are storing." So a 1TB backup will now cost about $100 per month. We can help you if you are getting burned, http://onlinestoragesolution.com
February 1st, 2011 at 8:31 am
I’ve been using Backblaze for a couple of years now (they have the best Mac client, period), and love it. Glad to see Gleb here — that gives me confidence they’re not going to pull this sort of bait-and-switch with my data that Mozy just did.
February 1st, 2011 at 12:30 pm
I have been a Mozy customer for about a year and from my perspective their support is substandard and they are now doubling their price. I am technical and eventually gave up trying to get them all the information they wanted, was taking too much of my time to shoot their problem. Now they want $120 / year, not going to happen
February 1st, 2011 at 12:52 pm
I'm going to move to Backblaze, too — I use about 200G of space for two computers. It's a hefty price jump with no value-add.
February 1st, 2011 at 1:15 pm
So sorry to hear that Mozy are throwing their customers with need for large backups out in the cold… But, I guess there will be alternatives – even I felt really safe with Mozy! Three year customer, with one more year of my subscription to go…
February 1st, 2011 at 1:21 pm
The only reason Mozy would make this change is because they WANT to get rid of customers. There is no mystery there. I just canceled my account. Then again, I was going to cancel anyway since it took me almost three weeks to get my data restored because of their stupid interface. (I tried to do a restore, and their backup program saw my blank hard drive and started deleting my backed up files on the Mozy server. I had to restore DELETED files.) Waiting two hours to get someone in chat is unacceptable. Somehow I get the feeling that the are going to have a lot of resources available really soon. 🙂
February 13th, 2011 at 8:34 pm
I'm amazed they deleted your files. I know that's their policy, but my Mozy backup is 200GB BECAUSE they don't ever delete anything I've deleted or moved.
I even switched to a new computer and it still has a backed up copy of files that I deleted off my OLD computer over a year ago.
I am switching as well once my prepaid contract ends.
February 1st, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Have been a customer for about 3 or 4 years now, but after my subscription is up, I'll be gone. My subscription price will be doubled. I only have 103GB stored on Mozy, so it isn't like I was using 1TB at all.
February 1st, 2011 at 3:55 pm
I've had Mozy for years. Like others have said here, their customer service blows. Fortunately, I've never had a catastrophic disk failure while I've been with Mozy. Not sure if they did their homework on this move. Backblaze is starting to look good. So long, Mozy.
February 1st, 2011 at 3:57 pm
once you've backed up your large amount of data — how much cost is involved in storing it. I'm one of those with 900GB of backup at mozy. I"m not paying 100 bucks a month to backup. I'll find an alternative.
February 1st, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Read the Mozy price increase with disgust. I have 200GB+ backed up with them, mostly pictures and music, and the price will increase 400%. Never going to happen. I can't understand the reason behind such a large increase. Both storage and bandwidth costs on a per MB basis continue to fall, and as Mozy are part of EMC I can't see them paying real street pricing for their storage systems. Will now start the process of a new online backup vendor.
February 14th, 2011 at 10:37 am
I don't want to deal with a company that can't handle my 200GB+ pictures without a 400% increase. They must not know how to efficiently handle this kind of data. If you have to raise your prices that much then you are doing something wrong and shouldn't be in business.
February 1st, 2011 at 7:39 pm
Mozy,….mozy… I am moseying over to BackBlaze
February 1st, 2011 at 8:02 pm
I can't believe this…..I have 1000GB+ backed up at Mozy! There is no WAY I am paying over $100 a month. Is Backblaze good? Do they do what Carbonite does as described above (lower your bandwidth and slow your speed down if you have a large amount stored with them?) Any othere sites I should check as well? I am so bummed.
February 4th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Try My Other Drive at http://www.myotherdrive.com they are awesome!
February 1st, 2011 at 8:35 pm
Agree with above posts. What have you done for me, Mozy to justify the cost increase? Sorry that I've referred so many people to your service as well. Good luck.
February 1st, 2011 at 9:27 pm
I have 432GB backed up through Mozy and add data at a rate of 4GB/month due to taking baby video and pictures. There's no way I'm paying $10/mo for 125GB, and then another $30/mo for each 20GB increment for what is standard and non-abusive use.
Earth to Mozy: fiber is cheap, and disk costs $40/terabyte. If you're spending more than $200/year to support me as a customer, you are doing something wrong. Google allows me to buy 1 terabyte of storage with unlimited upload/download for only $256/year. All you need to do is 1 way upload. Apparently EMC < Google.
February 1st, 2011 at 9:39 pm
Looks like I’ll be looking for a new home for my 450GB of data as well. I’d be up for paying $6.95 instead of the current $4.95 per month, or something along those lines, but there is no way I’m going to pay $44 per month. I loved Mozy and have recommended it to a number of people. Looks like the honeymoon is over…
February 1st, 2011 at 10:30 pm
3 years with Mozy. 220 Gb of data. I am leaving.
February 1st, 2011 at 11:30 pm
As Harry pointed out, SugarSync is not simply a pure backup solution – we provide backup but much more – access to all of your data from any device, real time sync and collaboration. For the month of February we are offering a promotion on our larger plans to entice backup users to experience the benefit of a true personal cloud. Details here http://www.sugarsync.com/blog/2011/02/01/a-specia…
Special Offer at http://www.sugarsync.com/switch
February 2nd, 2011 at 1:54 am
Been with Mozy since 2006. Started with less than 10 GB back then. Now backing up 65 GB of digital pictures from my camera. This actually already excludes all my music files for the sake of a speedy backup. My old 2 year subscription price was $109. Mozy now announces a new price tag of $215, which is – mildly put – outrageous.
Anyone in the (backup) storage business knows that demand for disk space and bandwidth is increasing all the time. This makes me wonder, why the aspect of planning and projecting backup capacity ahead wasn't in Mozy's business plan initially.
A good lesson about how quick a company can loose customers. I will be migrating each of the twelve of my relatives' computers to a new provider as soon as their contracts with Mozy expire. Personally, I already switched to test the new provider.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:09 am
I'm a happy user of Crashplan.
A week ago I discontinued (so before this announcement) my Moby subscription and got a refund. I was unsatisfied on the upload speed, they claim an unlimited upload speed, but in practice it was terrible. Secondly their account section on their website was very slow, so it was annoying to check if the backup was running correctly.
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:11 am
So my question is…..BackBlaze or Crashplan? is there a website that compares these two specifically?
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:27 am
I have the same question. I found this, but still not sure: http://gigaom.com/apple/backblaze-vs-crashplan-ma…
February 2nd, 2011 at 8:18 am
Macworld reviewed both and found we were superior (twice). Other reviews concur. We're less expensive, have more features, and more importantly, are a much larger/profitable company.
We don't bother comparing on our site as they're so small, and well, it's not really apples to apples. They recently expanded to an office of 1,500-2,000 sq ft. http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/01/10/hello-san-ma…
They also blogged about a failed attempt to sell the company. We do not actively market (or plan to) the sale of our company, which has been in business / profitable since 2001.
Technical note, we use enterprise drives in our storage, they cost nearly 2-3x as much as consumer grade drives. Backblaze has published they use inexpensive consumer drives.
February 2nd, 2011 at 9:11 am
Thank you for your comments, but I would prefer to hear from someone who DOES NOT WORK for either company, and therefore has no bias.
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:14 am
I loved Mozy although I never had to actually restore anything [thankfully]. Unfortunately, I have about 150gb of home movies and photos so Ill be finding another option.
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:19 am
I just closed my account with Mozy after >2 years. I back up ~180GB. This price hike would bump my $5/month to $16/month. So not only would it more than triple my costs, it would cap my storage. I have now moved over to Backblaze with their 10% coupon 🙂 How can they justify this price increase when their service blows? I agree with another commenter. They must have only 1 person handling chat support because after sitting there for quite some time, I just gave up. They offer nothing more than all the other services yet now they charge much more. I'll pass. Hello Backblaze! 🙂
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:52 am
Between this and UBB in Canada I think I'm just going to disconnect from the Internet altogether. 😛
February 2nd, 2011 at 9:09 am
I have been with mozy for 2 years and mostly backup pics, vids, documents, and ISOs of important puchased software like office, WIN7, and other downloaded purchased apps. I use 98GB and I too am very upset at the doubling of the price. I am going to find an alternative.
February 2nd, 2011 at 9:28 am
This is pretty ridiculous. I’ve been using Mozy for years and have always vouched for it as a great service. I cant even count how many people I put on to Mozy. I have a feeling most of the users who helped to spread the word about Mozy are also those "minority" users who are now getting the short end of the stick for using their service with out limits as advertised. I’m definitely one of those people.
I have about 400GB worth of file backed up that I’ll have to move somewhere else now.
I actually started losing confidence with Mozy last month when they released a new Desktop App that failed my backups for about 2 weeks without notifying me. Their customer service was kind of weak and I ended up having to downgrade back to the original version without promise of an actual solution.
Probably going to switch to Crash Plan since they keep multiple versions of files rather than deleting them after 30 days…
February 2nd, 2011 at 10:08 am
I've been using Mozy for about a year now and all I have to say is they have lost me completely. I'm not going to go from paying $5.99 a month to $60 a month for substandard service and slowwwwww uploads. I'm not sure where they get off pointing fingers at Carbonite for slow speeds, it took me weeks to upload a fairly small (comparatively) amount of data so thats very much the pot calling the kettle black. I'm going to look into BackBlaze. Way to help our your customers Mozy.
February 2nd, 2011 at 10:57 pm
What BURNS me is they don't even give you a heads up. On the day it took effect is when I got them notice. Just happens it the DAY my plan needed to be renewed. They did that at 10.00 am at the old rate, then at 2pm sent me the notice of the price increases. Will be gone by the of the month.
I have work with EMC (owner of Mozy) in my professional like, not surprise at all.
February 3rd, 2011 at 1:25 am
Just closed my Mozy account. Going to wait and see what other offers – like the one from Crashplan – start to emerge.
February 3rd, 2011 at 9:06 am
My name is David and I am with UpdateStar, the company which offers UpdateStar Online Backup, an online backup service with unlimited storage for home and business users with rave reviews from the press. We have a special offer with unlimited storage, where you can save another 30 $. You can find it here: http://client.updatestar.com/en/onlinebackup/comp…
February 3rd, 2011 at 2:45 pm
I've used Mozy for the last year and have never been confident in their service. My annual renew is coming up in a few weeks and I was already on the fence about renewing then they spring this on me. I was storing about 500gb of data and their new pricing structure is nuts. Also anyone who says Mozy does not throttle their data is wrong, it took me 3 months to do my initial backup, running 24/7. I am dropping them, going somewhere else and never recommending them again. Right now I'm trying CrashPlan who is offering a 30 day FULL free trial.
February 4th, 2011 at 6:36 am
For the best price in online backup, visit MyOtherDrive.com. They are 4 times cheaper than Mozy and unlike carbonite, they never slow your uploads, regardless of how much data you have stored. Google "online backup" or visit http://www.myotherdrive.com.
February 4th, 2011 at 10:23 am
I hope businesses don't use these bargain services. What do you expect for $5 per month? Tomahawk is your answer for business or those serious about actually restoring your data when needed 😉 http://www.tomahawkbackup.com/
February 5th, 2011 at 9:47 am
Very happy with Mozy – which I also got loads of friends to use – and now its bye bye. Tested out a few other services (I'm a Mac user) and now happily uploading to my new service CrashPlan. Bye bye Mozy.
February 12th, 2011 at 1:29 am
I've been a Mozy customer since 2007. My subscription renews in March. I just downloaded my Carbonite trial and I'll be taking a look at BackBlaze as well. Either way, good-bye Mozy…
February 18th, 2011 at 4:36 pm
I'm going to be one of those Mozy users who will be gone. I have a 2tb drive for a lifetime of datafiles, music files, etc. which would cost me several hundred dollars a month. I have to think this is an insane move. . .everything but everything is requiring more space and hard drive prices are dropping through the floor. Mozy's response? jack up the costs 10 times or more! I think it's short-sighted. If they can't sustain backing up today's hard drives, they need to just sell to a company who can.
May 14th, 2011 at 10:50 am
I'm not staying with Mozy and their new price plans! I think it's a bad marketing move, there's too much competition out there to pull stunts like this.
June 13th, 2011 at 7:12 am
I made the switch to Backblaze from Mozy and am very happy. I just wish I would have known about the 10% off offer before I switched. No big deal, it is still cheaper than Mozy. Thank you Backblaze.
July 4th, 2011 at 8:19 am
im one of the high volume users who now has to finda new service. iI stored around 470gb.
August 11th, 2011 at 8:55 am
i'll go with the big price hike
August 29th, 2011 at 1:55 pm
We provide software that powers online backup services, so we understand that these commodity online backup services don't offer business-class features like our service partners do, but after reading this post and some of the comments, I took some time to run some numbers: our partners on average provide about 5 hours of live tech support (on demand mind you 😉 to their customers, and also proactively monitor their backups (at 5 minutes a day this would be ~30 hours a year), leading to a hidden cost of ~$1400 a year.
The scariest thing in the post above is the bandwidth throttling in the link to Carbonite. Wow that would be a huge downer if you were backing up a business-class dataset. Funny that the page seems to say they throttle at 2mbps right out of the gate!
January 6th, 2012 at 9:14 pm
Mozy is a RIP. My cost for storage with with them would've gone up 1000%. And no, I didn't add an extra zero to that number by mistake. I did some research and am moving over to Backblaze. Good luck Mozy on trying to stay in business.
February 5th, 2012 at 3:43 pm
Just started moving my backup to Backblaze from Mosy. Tried Carbonite on their free 30 day trial. After 30 days they had moved 18 GB of the 56GB on one computer. The alternative seeding service offered was more expensive than a full year backup.
Backblaze has some serious limitations, such as not backing up .iso and other video files.