Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Mozy vs BackBlaze

After investing all the time in energy into my genealogy files I have developed multiple backup plans to keep them safe.  One plan was using an online backup service called Mozy. Ever since Mozy doubled their price for backing up my almost 100GB external drive I have been researching for alternatives.

Carbonite is highly recommend but I couldn't see anywhere on their website the ability to pay monthly.  The biggest drawback for me was the $54.95 yearly cost is only for your internal hard drive on your computer.  I store everything on an external hard drive and only use the C drive of my computer for program files. So I couldn't see that Carbonite would save me money if I had to pay for backing up my external hard drive.

Finally I have stumbled upon a solution - Backblaze!  It cost $5.00 a month for unlimited back up of the internal and external hard drives attached to my computer. In fact if you have an external drive that you backup it will save your files online for 30 days, even if the external is unplugged from your computer during that time frame. Just plug in the external and back it up once every 30 days and your good to go. This means the external I have for my laptop, and my flash drives can all get backed up for no additional charge.

Another benefit to Backblaze is how lite weight the program is.  It's not a resource hog like Mozy was.  Sometimes I had issues with Mozy even opening to let me see what I was backing up.  Not an issue with Backblaze. It is snapper at backing my files online too.  I figure it averaged 5GB each night (8 hrs) when I turned up the speed.

Backblaze automatically backups everything on your computer, except for iTunes Podcasts and certain file types.  In the setting you can adjust it to include some of the excluded files types if you want. Backblaze uses Military grade encryption. It also allows you to set a private encryption key for extra security if desired.

I really like Backblaze and am so glad that Mozy raised their prices so I could go out and find such a wonderful alternative.

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day.

1 comment:

Stephan said...

Here is a list of more alternatives that might interest consumers. http://www.top10cloudstorage.com/