Is Mozy Home Still a Good Backup Choice for Photographers?

Last summer, I signed up for Mozy home backup. It cost $4.99 a month, and I was able to backup an unlimited amount of files in the cloud. It seemed almost too good to be true, and I even wrote an article here on AC about the possibilities of Mozy.

Recently, that all changed. Mozy has removed the unlimited backup option. Instead, you can pay a flat fee for up to 125gb of data, and you'll pay extra for anything above that. For the amount of images that I backed up as an intense hobbyist photographer (400+gb), my price would have jumped from $4.99/month to over $40/month.

Is Mozy still a good choice for photographers as an online backup solution?

Alternatives to Mozy

Carbonite.Carbonite was one of Mozy's main competitors, and they also offered a flat fee for unlimited backups. At the time of writing, you can still get an unlimited backup for $55/year (~$5/month). One problem with Carbonite is that you can't backup an external hard drive. But... you could still install a second hard drive into your machine, use that as an initial backup, and then back everything up to Carbonite for a low fee.

Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is another online backup service, tailored more towards large business backups. While they provide great reliability, Amazon S3 isn't necessarily cheap for photographers. You pay per the gigabyte, and with a 400gb+ backup, I would have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 or $50 to backup my images with Amazon S3. That makes it far more exepsnvie than Carbonite or the old Mozy, and kind of inline with the new Mozy pricing plan.

CrashPlan. CrashPlan still offers an unlimited option. You can backup a single computer for $3/month, or you can create a household account and backup an unlimited number of computers for $6/month. Either way, there's no storage limit to your backup. One potential problem is that CrashPlan is a fairly young company in terms of online backup... but chances are they'll change their pricing plan before they go out of business and delete all of your files. So, they're probably a safe option to use, but don't count on the price being the same forever.

What To Do?

Mozy's decision suggests one thing to me: unlimited storage plans are fairly untenable, and their long term future is questionable. Other providers, like Carbonite and CrashPlan (and other, newer companies) may follow suit and start to charge per the gigabyte.

This makes sense. Storage costs money. If a service only attracts people with small back-ups, then they can offer to advertise an unlimited amount. But, once a group like semi-professional digital photographers realizes what's going on, a backup service may not be able to sustain that pricing model. If you're willing to take a risk, find another unlimited backup provider like CrashPlan. If not, go with a solution like Amazon that is more costly but, in all likelihood, going to remain the same for the long haul.