Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to share your experience with MozyHome. You bring up a very important point. Most people probably don’t realize what you’ve pointed out.

Carbonite has the same policy. This is typical for most of the popular, well-known online backup service providers. They couldn’t possibly backup and retain EVERY version of a file you saved on your computer forever for less than $5/month. To keep the price down, they provide unlimited backup but only of those files you have on your computer – and only the latest versions.

There are services out there that provide the type of backup you’re talking about but they aren’t as well known, aren’t as easy to use, and have backup limitations in terms of how much you can backup every month.

One way to help prevent the accidental loss of files is to backup your files once a week to an external hard drive (or even once a month) – but keep the online backup working in the background as well. When you backup to your external hard drive, you won’t lose any files because once the files are moved to your external hard drive, they don’t disappear unless you delete them yourself. So if you accidentally delete the file (or folder) on your computer, it will still be on your external hard drive.

TravisVS
Site Admin

I have a home computer wich we all in my family are using, and I have been using Mozy for about a year now to backup all photos and documents. So far I have been pleased with the service – it does it job. So far i have backed up more than 150 Gb of all kind of data.

But…. some time ago (probably last spring), someone has accidentaly deleted a wholde directory on the computer with photos. It took some time before we realized that the folder was gone, and I was heading over to Mozy online to restore the folder – with no luck. The folder is gone from Mozy online as well
It turnes out that Mozy is mirroring the information on your computer on a 30-days basis, wich means that if you delete a file or folder on your computer, Mozy will do the same 30 days later on their backup.

My point: if you for some reason loose data on your computer, you need to identify the loss _before_ 30 days has gone – otherwise the data is lost forever.

I think this is quite crucial information to be aware of, and things like this should be the first priority when comparing different solutions (I am now looking at Carbonite, but they don’t have any information about this as far as I can see).

I’ve been meaning to take a look at SugarSync and maybe adding them to my list of recommended backup solutions. Their big thing is the fact that you can sync your files across multiple computers (hence the name Sugar “Sync”). Unless a person uses multiple computers the whole sync thing may be a little over-rated. However, if you have more than one computer that you use regularly, then it definitely may be a service worth trying.

TravisVS
Site Admin

I agree. And the fact that MozyHome does have 2gb of storage for free is something I should probably highlight more. And you’re right, without having a time limit it is nice not to “worry” about having to start paying if you’re not ready. I’m glad you had a positive experience with Mozy.

TravisVS
Site Admin