Dave Naffziger's Blog

Based on a recommendation from a friend a while ago, I began using Mozy for backing up my machines. I have been incredibly impressed and have recommended the service to anyone within earshot.

I had been using Sharpcast for photo backup, and using a Linksys NSLU2 and an external hard drive to conduct local backups. My initial excitement about Sharpcast quickly eroded as they abandoned the product and left all of the rough edges in place. I grew tired of the (slight) administration overhead of managing local backups and decided to give Mozy a try.

Mozy has been awesome for several reasons:

• It just works. Install the client and you can basically forget about it.
• Excellent interface. It is incredibly intuitive. I’ve always been able to quickly find the things that I want.
• Easy to retrieve backed up documents. Mozy offers a number of easy ways to get your backups. DVD, context menu, explorer extensions, website, etc.

I’m pretty convinced that there isn’t a better solution out there. However, Mozy doesn’t do the one thing that would be very useful: sync. And since they’ve been acquired by EMC, I don’t expect tremendous movement.

So, I’m pretty excited about Microsoft’s recent announcement of Live Mesh. While GDrive remains as mythical as the ‘man-month’, MSFT is launching a beta of Live Mesh, a pretty ambitious Remote Desktop in the cloud (Good overview at TechCrunch). While I’m most excited by the ‘Unified Data Management’ of Live Mesh, I can definitely see the benefits of ‘unified’ every-thing else. It is a great desktop-up balance to the cloud-down approach taken by Google/Adobe. I tend to favor the ‘cloud-down’ approach but there are definitely instances where desktop-up are favorable (like document backup and sync).

I’m a very happy Mozy user at the moment and will continue to recommend it, but Live Mesh is the first offering that has the potential to dislodge it.

Update:

I take back all the good things I said about Mozy. Mozy actually sucks.