24 February 2008
Why I have cancelled my Mozy subscription, and what it would take for me to sign up again
Late last week, I cancelled my Mozy online backup subscription.
I’d been using Mozy to back up my Home folder on my new 24” iMac, but over about four months I’m guessing I was able to make one successful backup. Each morning, I’d be greeted by an error message from Mozy — usually ‘unable to communicate with backup servers’ — or the sad sight of the software sitting at the ‘preparing files’ stage and unable, for whatever reason, to move on.
Of course, this isn’t entirely Mozy’s fault. Broadband access in Australia is in a pretty parlous condition — we’re on an ADSL2+ connection here and, while we get decent download speeds, uploading is a bit of a joke. And this means that, even if the Mozy end of things had worked better than it did, the idea of uploading 16Gb of data ‘into the cloud’ remains a bit of a pipe dream, if you’ll pardon the pun.
But to be honest, I could have lived with the very slow backup speeds. After all, Mozy runs in the background so why should I care if it takes a month to complete a backup? So long as my data is backed up, speed isn’t crucial.
No, the straw that finally broke the camel’s back was that Mozy’s Mac client is still in beta, and, at least as of my last use, is a massive memory hog.
Before I finally shut it off on Thursday, it was chewing through 1.5Gb of RAM and counting. My previously sprightly iMac was hanging on simple tasks like clicking a link in Safari, and launching applications took forever.
As soon as I’d gotten rid of Mozy, though, everything was back to normal.
(The argument can certainly be made that what I experienced was par for the course with beta software — that I took my chances and was bitten by a bug. But for a service I’m paying around $50 per year for, I’d expect this sort of thing to be taken care of. My feeling is you can either be in beta, or charge for your product, but not both. This may turn out to be a controversial opinion.)
For now, I’m returning to external Firewire drives. But the dream of backing up ‘into the cloud’ remains — it’s just going to take better broadband infrastructure and better Mac software to make the dream a reality.