Online backup solution: Carbonite vs Mozy
Question:
I was just curious why you like Mozy over Carbonite. I read a review that said they were similar, but the guy ended up picking Carbonite over Mozy for unlimited storage, price difference, and speed. What do you think about the differences between Mozy and Carbonite? Why did you switch?
Answer:
Carbonite is actually a little cheaper than Mozy. So that’s good. But there is one big thing that Mozy does better that makes it worthwhile to me:
Carbonite is able to back up whatever files you need, but by default it does NOT do so. In my case, it was video files: My family uses my home PCs to store our photos and movies taken by our digital camera. These movies are ‘AVI’ files. I also use my PC to store DVD movies (like of our daughter). Neither AVI files or large DVD files are backed up by default by Carbonite. After I copy them over, I have to then tell Carbonite, “yes, I want to back up these files”. And I have to do this every time I copy a new file in place. Often I forget, and that file doesn’t get backed up until I remember.
Mozy is different: Tell it to backup a folder, then tell it to backup ALL files in that folder, and they will be backed up. Then I can just copy files into a folder and not have to do any manual, per-file tweaks to make sure the backup is happening.
For the Carbonite-supplied tech detail of what doesn’t get backed up, go to this page and read the section titled “Technical Details”.
The short story: Mozy is more of a “set it and forget it” operation. Carbonite requires manual checks and changes to make sure your stuff is getting backed up. I want to know that my backup is actually backing up everything. Without extra hassle, without me having to modify things every time I add new files to the backup set.
That’s why I’ve picked Mozy.
