I’ve reviewed three different desktop backup applications on wonko.com over the years: Carbonite, Mozy, and CrashPlan. I stopped using Carbonite because it was too basic and too expensive. I stopped using Mozy because I lost hundreds of gigs of data due to a hard drive failure and Mozy’s horrendously broken restore process made it impossible to restore many of my backed up files. I still use CrashPlan, which I love and which has reliably saved my ass several times.
My backup software reviews are among the most commented-on posts on this blog. People find them in searches and can’t resist adding their thoughts. These posts still get several new comments each week. Since my blog has become a repository of comments, both positive and negative, on backup software, I thought I’d tally up the totals.
To produce the graph below, I perused all the comments on this site that were attached to one of my backup software reviews or which contained the name of one or more of the aforementioned backup applications. I excluded my own comments and comments from users who clearly hadn’t actually used the software in question. This graph is a tally of all the positive and negative comments that remained for each application.
The totals are as follows:
Carbonite: 1 positive, 3 negative
CrashPlan: 7 positive, 1 negative
Mozy: 10 positive, 88 negative
I’m not sure the totals for Carbonite and CrashPlan are even statistically relevant, but it’s clear that people hate Mozy (or at least that people who search for Mozy and find this blog hate it).
Update: I’ve updated the totals and the graph to reflect the comments on this post as of 2009-08-14 17:53 PDT.
Comments
Add another positive for crashplan
I love em.
Love CrashPlan
Tried Mozy, JungleDisk, Backblaze, and always went back to CrashPlan.
Jungle Disk
I have never tried any of those, but I have nothing but good things to say about Jungle Disk.
Why would anyone use anything but Crashplan???
The cheapest, the easiest, the best. What’s not to like???
Crashplan
I used to use Mozy, and it was LAME. I switched to Crashplan about a year ago. I use it on my Ubuntu server, Macs, and Windows. It works great and is very easy to use. I couldn’t recommend it more!
Which version
I use Memoplan, and whilst there is nothing wrong with it (it retains everything forever, which is a bit of a pain though), I am still looking for the best provider.
May I ask:
1. Do you use crachplan or crashplan+?
2. Do you use crashplan central?
Re: Which version
I use CrashPlan+, and yes, I use CrashPlan Central as one of my backup destinations.
Mozy
Mozy upgraded to a new exciting 2.0 version last month. You can backup to a local USB or firewire disk now. But I’m sorry to say it still sucks. I haven’t had a decent backup in 4 week, the app keeps hanging and tech support is clueless..Goodby Mozy
Mozy 2.0 is worse than 1.6
About 2 weeks ago I upgraded to Mozy 2.0 and I’ve had nothing but problems since. First of all, the software is supposed to popup with a warning if the backups haven’t run for 2 days (per the settings) but I had left the software run for a week assuming all was well. Mozy was quietly failing all the while accumulating many many errors. MozyServerError2, FilesystemError4, MozyServerError17, ConnectionError3, SnapshotError0. All damn week Mozy was failing day after day and not letting me know. I finally noticed because the back was still running the morning after, and I found that it had been running for 40 hours straight (normal times are in the 10 min to an hour range). WTF?
So I do some research on Mozy’s site, download some diagnostic utilities from there site, and create a support case uploading the diagnostic logs. I told them that I never had these problems with version 1.6, and only began when I upgraded to version 2.0. They responded that I could reinstall version 1.6, but they didn’t recommend it. But they didn’t mention what I could actually do to solve the problems. They didn’t say anything about the logs files I uploaded. They didn’t give me anything useful.
Now I’ve been going back and forth with one of their support techs for the past week and I still get all of these errors and I’m no closer to getting a successful backup.
Thanks for your articles on how bad Mozy is and the option of using Crashplan. I’m definitely switching.
Beware Mozy restore
have used Mozy for two years without needing to restore. Knew that they had an option to get disks overnighted to you if need quick restore. so this week a key drive crashed and Mozy says, sure we can overnight to you, IN A WEEK and at the cost of over $200!! So instead I thought I would use that week to slowly restore over the internet. But guess what. Mozy has crashed and hung and otherwise made this very, very frustrating. Have had to post several tech tickets and their support people have been slow to respond, and pretty clueless when they do. I will switch as soon as I get my data back.