Carbonite vs Mozy Home: A Review and Comparison

Here’s Why

When I was first looking for an online backup solution about a year ago I was struggling with the whole “Carbonite vs Mozy Home” choice and after testing both services I ended up staying with Carbonite. You can read about my experiences with both by visiting my Carbonite backup review and Mozy Home review pages.

If you look at the comparison table above, it would seem like these services are virtually the same. In fact if you look close at the price details, Mozy Home actually has a slight advantage on the one and two year subscriptions if you factor in the 10% discount that they offer. So what was it about Carbonite that put them ahead of Mozy Home?

While these two online backup services are indeed virtually identical, there are a few areas not shown in the table where Carbonite has the advantage. They are: ease-of-use, reliability, and support. Let’s take a look at each one.

Ease-Of-Use with Carbonite
As I mentioned in my Carbonite review, the service just seems to work! Everything from installing the software to doing the initial backup was totally effortless. I didn’t have any performance issues, which I was primarily concerned about since both of these services run in the background on your computer, and the entire initial backup was smooth sailing. For me, it truly was a “set and forget” backup solution.

And now today the daily continuous backups that take place have been working perfectly. Case in point: as I write this review, I am backing up an additional 30GB of videos I recently saved to my computer. I have Carbonite setup on my computer to do continuous daily backups instead of the scheduled backups. What this means is Carbonite will backup files while I’m working on other stuff. Since 30GB is a lot of data, the backup process has been going on now for about a day.

When you use the continuous, or automatic backup, Carbonite essentially pauses the backup process whenever the computer is being used so that’s why it takes a while. At any rate, these video files are quietly being backed up while I continue to do my work. I haven’t received any kind of errors and there have been no performance issues at all. I simply check the daily backup status and it tells me how far along it is. It’s that simple.

With Mozy Home, my initial experience wasn’t the same. My computer was noticeably slower during the initial backup to the point I had to adjust the backup settings. Now this wasn’t a big deal, but compared to Carbonite, it didn’t work flawlessly “out of the box.” There were also more advanced settings to play with on Mozy than there were with Carbonite. I suppose if you’re a computer geek and like to mess with all that, Mozy is better, but for something as simple as backing up my files, I didn’t have a desire for all those advanced settings.

Reliability with Carbonite
Now this one is tough to comment on completely. For starters, when I am talking about reliability I’m talking primarily about the reliability of the backups actually taking place. I didn’t experience any issues with Mozy Home or Carbonite. However, I read on a few blogs that folks using Mozy Home experienced the occasional connection error during backups and some commented that when they went to restore their files they weren’t all there. Again, I didn’t experience that with either of these services, but I found the comments interesting nonetheless.

I’m giving Carbonite the edge for reliability based primarily on my own experiences and the comments I read about both of these services as I was researching them when putting together my online backup reviews. As I’ve already mentioned, my daily backups have been taking place without any issues at all since I’ve been a Carbonite customer and I’ve been a customer for almost a year now.

Customer Support with Carbonite
I hate to sound like a broken record, but both of these services performed well in this department except Carbonite was quicker and more thorough. I sent an email to Carbonite and I immediately received one of those auto-generated, “we got your message” emails but it had some very useful FAQ’s for me to look through while I was waiting for my personal reply. After I sent the email, I totally forgot they had live chat so I immediately gave that try.

I only had to wait about 2 minutes to get a live chat rep and he was very friendly and helpful. I had all my questions answered within a span of about 7 minutes. What was really impressive was that when I went back to my email after the brief live chat session, I had received a personal reply to the email I sent just minutes ago! I don’t know if this type of response is the norm, but for me it has been. In the interest of full disclosure, I have only contacted them during business hours so I suppose their support could be slower if I contacted them during non-business hours.

Carbonite vs Mozy Home: The Bottom Line
Carbonite and Mozy Home are the two biggest players for home online backup. As the comparison chart shows, the features and prices of these two services are virtually identical. And as I pointed out in my analysis, while I ultimately went with Carbonite, I didn’t have a bad experience with Mozy Home either.

In the end, I went with the service that worked best for me. I think that’s what it ultimately comes down to when selecting an online backup solution for your home or small office. You need to test both services to see which one performs best for you and chose the one you are most comfortable with. And since both allow you to test their services for free, it makes sense to take advantage of those offers and see for yourself which one works best.

For me, the choice was easy. Carbonite was easier to use, was rock solid, and their customer support was great. Regardless of which service you go with, just set your expectations accordingly. You can’t expect perfection when you’re paying less than $5/month for unlimited backup! I’m sure I’ll have my frustrations with Carbonite sooner or later, but I’m o.k. with that because I look at both of these services as cheap insurance and peace of mind. A few annoyances that might come up here and there are perfectly fine with me.