Unlimited is not unlimited.
First of all I am a true believe of nothing is for free. There will always be a cost someday, somehow.
That has just happened with Mozy.
I started using that online service a couple years ago. Unlimited storage for just $105 for a year. That sounds almost too good to be true. But anyway I decided to go for it since it was so cheap.
On Mozy's homepage they advertise with big letters:
Every Photo, Every Document, Every Memory: Safe with Mozy
And when Mozy in the past has been asked the question: Unlimited, really? The response has always been that for Mozy unlimited means unlimited.
Obviously I setup my backup software to backup all data on my photo pc. That has turned out to be almost 700 GB. It took many months for that to be uploaded but finnally less than 1 month ago the data was finally uploaded. Hooray.
Well yesterday I received a surprising email. It turned out that Mozy never intended to keep their word of unlimited storage. Because I use the service to backup ALL my photos (remember they say Every Photo on the homepage) I am a bad apple that spoils it for everyone else. Forgive me for taking "Every photo" literally. Mozy decided to introduce new quota plans. They say they have done research that tells them that 50 GB for one pc or 125 GB for up to 3 pc's is more than adequate for backup in the year of 2011.
So they introduced new prices. That means if I want to renew my service when it expires in november I have to pay $1680 for 2 pc's for 2 years instead of just $210.
On Mozy's customer forum customers are outraged over this and Mozy people are kept busy editing and deleting posts. They also keep saying that they want to keep their customers but with an 800% increase in price it is crystal clear to me that they do not want me as their customer.
So I will be requesting a refund for the remaining time and then I will delete my account. I will never ever recommend Mozy to anybody.
Loosing Mozy as backup is not catastrophic for me as it has always just been number 6 backup and really just a convenient way of off site backup. But from reading in the Mozy forum it seems that many customers have relied on that service as their only backup.
I will not be replacing Mozy with another online backup solution for two reasons. I don't want to spend months waiting for the backup to complete and second the services that are left that offer "unlimited" storage throttle bandwidth so when the amount of data exceeds 200 GB the upload speed is limited to 100 kbit/s.
So instead I have ordered 2 external harddisks. These will become my future off site backup. I will backup on the first one and then place that off site. I wil then continue backups on the seond disk. After a month or so I will swap the disks around.
