Mozy, owned by EMC, is a back-up provider. You run their software and they spirit your precious files away to the cloud, on their own (presumably EMC-based) servers. The company, which long offered unlimited back-up of files for a paltry $5 a month, increased their prices and cut the unlimited plan, citing financial problems with the model i.e. it cost to much to transfer and store terabytes of essentially useless information.
We had a bit of an inkling that this would happen but no one wrote about it here because this isn’t ITCrunch and Mozy was apparently as sexy as granny panties to the regular TC crew. We got our first note on January 16 from a Mozy employee:
In the next few weeks, Mozy will be discontinuing their unlimited service offering. Since the EMC acquisition, they have had a difficult time controlling expenses and managing morale and they have lost control of their economic model.
Any Mozy employee can verify this. I suggest you call Mozy headquarters in Seattle, or American Fork, Utah and ask to speak with someone about this. Two of the general managers that are running Mozy: Charlotte Yarkoni, Vance Checketts.
It’ll be announced anyway in a couple of weeks, but it would be fun if you were to scoop it.
And then we got ten more when the actual change happened from people expressing outrage and disgust at the untoward jacking of prices on Mozy’s part from $5/Unlimited to $6/50GB. Heaven forfend that a company retracts its largesse because, as as Howard Marks eloquently puts it, the folks with only a little data are essentially propping up the jerks slapping 600GB into the cloud every night.
But I have come to bury Mozy, not to praise it. The price of hard drives is so low and back-up is so easy that every home user should have some sort of personal storage solution. “But John,” you’ll say, “Mozy helped me keep my stuff out of my house! What if the monster from Cloverfield smashed my neighborhood tomorrow.” Well, first you could call a data bankruptcy and realize that whatever you had in those 600GB of data you were backing up probably wasn’t that important in the first place. Second, you should have kept your special files – 5GB worth of your home directory, your documents, etc. – on a cloud server like Mozy and then kept the rest of the junk – the porn, the movies, the 500 similar images of that one time you went to Scranton – on an external back-up disk. As precious as your memories are, I assure you that you will never print those 10,000 pictures you have stored in iPhoto. Never. Ever.
And don’t give me the old saw about Grandma needing a back-up solution: if you love grandma, you buy her a USB drive and run the built-in Windows or Mac back-up systems in the background. What’s grandma doing that’s so important anyway? Genealogy?
Third, and this is important, Mozy could go out of business tomorrow or, on a whim, delete your files. Flickr deleted some dude’s pictures just for kicks and Youtube shut down our own CrunchGear account recently because of some bogus DMCA claim. These guys are not good at keeping your stuff safe. On that on thine own self depend.
Again, not to belittle the pain of people who got something for essentially free and now are upset when they have to pay a little bit more, but I feel your argument is stupid. Mozy is a business. If you don’t like their practices, vote with your wallet.