When I was first looking for an online backup solution a couple years ago I was struggling with the whole “Carbonite vs Mozy Home” choice and after testing both services I ended up staying with Carbonite. You can read about my experiences with both by visiting my Carbonite backup review and Mozy Home review pages.
If you look at the comparison table below, you’ll see they are very similar in the features they offer but there is one glaring difference between the two when it comes to their plans and pricing. When I first compared Carbonite vs Mozy back in 2008, both offered unlimited backup for an affordable flat fee. Mozy no longer offers unlimited backup for a flat fee. In addition, they increased their prices so you pay more for less backup.
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Carbonite |
Mozy |
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| Plan Overview | ||
| Storage Capacity: | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Plans & Pricing: | 1 Year: $59
2 Year: $109 3 Year: $139 *Prices are per computer. |
50 GB Plan: $5.99/Mo. (1 computer) 125 GB Plan: $9.99/Mo. Add $2/month for each 20 GB of data storage added to either plan. Get 1 month free with a one-year plan and 3 months free with a two-year plan. |
| Free Storage: | None | 2 GB |
| Current Promotions: | 10% off one-year subscriptions with our exclusive Carbonite discount | 15% off one and two year subscriptions with our exclusive Mozy discount |
| Features | ||
| Automatic Backup: |
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| Scheduled Backup: |
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| Remote Access: |
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| Mobile Access: |
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| Sub-Accounts: |
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| Archiving: |
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 30 days |
| File Search: |
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| Public File Sharing: |
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| Private File Sharing: |
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| File Versioning: |
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| File Syncing: |
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| Security: | 128-bit & 448-bit encryptions used | 128-bit, AES 256-bit, & 448-bit encryptions used |
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Compatibility: |
Windows: 7, Vista, XP Mac: OS X 10.5 or greater |
Windows: 7, Vista, XP, 2000 Mac: OS X 10.4 or greater |
| Customer Support | ||
| Telephone Support: |
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| Email Support: |
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| Live Chat: |
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For paid plans only |
| Company Information | ||
| Company Location: | Boston, MA | Seattle, WA |
| Established: | 2005 | 2005 |
| Website: | www.Carbonite.com | www.Mozy.com |
| Review Information | ||
| Best For: | Home users who want a simple backup solution | Home users who have less than 125GB of data to backup |
| Pros: |
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| Cons: |
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| Review: | Read the Carbonite Review | Read the MozyHome Review |
Carbonite vs Mozy Home: And The Winner Is…Carbonite
Given Mozy’s changes to their plans and pricing, Carbonite has a distinct advantage over Mozy today. There are other areas where Carbonite also has the advantage. They are: ease-of-use, reliability, and support. Let’s take a look at each one.
Ease-Of-Use with Carbonite
As I mentioned in my Carbonite review, the service just works! Installing the software and doing the initial backup was totally effortless, although the intitial backup did take some time. Both of these services claim that it takes 24 hours to backup 3-4GB of data so I was o.k. with the initial delay.
I’ve been with Carbonite since 2008 and since the first day, my daily backups have been flawless with virtually no performance issues. I say, “virtually no,” because ever since I switched to Windows 7, I have had a minor performance issue when playing audio or video files while Carbonite is backing up my files. You can read about this issue in my full Carbonite review. Aside from this minor annoyance, I have never received any backup errors and when I check to make sure all of my files are being backed up, they are all there on Carbonite’s secured servers. It truly has been a “set and forget” backup solution for me.
With Mozy Home, my initial experience wasn’t the same. My computer was noticeably slower during the initial backup to the point I had to adjust the backup settings. Now this wasn’t a big deal, but compared to the initial setup with Carbonite, it didn’t work flawlessly “out of the box.” There were also more advanced settings to play with on Mozy than there were with Carbonite. I suppose if you’re a computer geek and like to mess with all that, Mozy is better, but for something as simple as backing up my files, I didn’t have a desire for all those advanced settings.
Reliability with Carbonite
Now this one is tough to comment on completely. For starters, when I am talking about reliability I’m talking primarily about the reliability of the backups actually taking place. I didn’t experience any issues with Mozy Home or Carbonite. However, I read on a few blogs that folks using Mozy Home experienced the occasional connection error during backups and some commented that when they went to restore their files they weren’t all there. Again, I didn’t experience that with either of these services, but I found the comments interesting nonetheless.
I give Carbonite the edge for reliability based primarily on my own experiences and the comments I read about both of these services as I was researching them when putting together my online backup reviews. As I’ve already mentioned, my daily backups have been taking place without any issues at all since I’ve been a Carbonite customer and I’ve been a customer for over two years now.
Customer Support with Carbonite
Both of these services are just o.k. in this department and need improvement. However, I give Carbonite the advantage because it offers telephone support – including priority support if you want to pay for it – and live chat. Mozy doesn’t offer telephone support at all and only provides live chat for their paid plans.
I have never had to call Carbonite so I cannot comment on their phone support. Their email support is o.k. at best and their live chat is excellent. When I’ve emailed them in the past, it has taken a good day for a response and the responses were not that helpful. The live chat, on the other hand, has been superb. I rarely have to wait more than a few minutes for a rep and the reps I have chatted with have been helpful and knowledgeable.
I honestly can’t comment on Mozy’s support because I wasn’t with them long enough to test it out. I also was using their free 2GB plan so live chat and telephone support weren’t available.
Carbonite vs Mozy Home: The Bottom Line
Carbonite and Mozy Home have been the two main players for mainstream online backup for the past couple years. As the comparison chart shows, the features of these two services are virtually identical. And as I pointed out in my analysis, while I ultimately went with Carbonite, I didn’t have a bad experience with Mozy Home the short time I was with them. However, with Mozy dropping their flat pricing for unlimited backup and increasing their prices, Carbonite has a clear advantage over Mozy.
In the end, the service that worked best for me was Carbonite. I think that’s what it ultimately comes down to when selecting an online backup solution for your home or small office. You need to these services to see which one performs best for you and chose the one you are most comfortable with. And since most of these services allow you to test their services for free, it makes sense to take advantage of those offers and see for yourself which one works best.
For me, the choice was easy, Carbonite was easier to use, was rock solid, and their live chat support was great. Regardless of which service you go with, just set your expectations accordingly. You can’t expect perfection when you’re dealing with these online backup services. Carbonite is no exception, but I’m o.k. with that because I look at these services as cheap insurance and peace of mind. A few annoyances that might come up here and there are perfectly fine with me.
(valid only on one year subscriptions)
Related posts:
- Mozy 2.0 For Windows Launched: Mozy’s Answer to Faster, Safer Backup
- Mozy Online Backup Service Finally Hits UK and Ireland
- Mozy App for iOS Launches: Your Backed Up Files Just an App Away
- SugarSync vs Mozy: Which One Is Right For You?
- Carbonite Launches Carbonite Blackberry App, Upgrades iPhone App
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Glad you’ve had such good luck with Carbonite. I’ve had them for a month, but the entire last week I’ve been without service. I wanted to switch my registration to my new computer and come to find out the server my backup is stored on at Carbonite is down, broken, busted, not working, no redundant server, no failover, no disaster recovery. The people at Carbonite don’t really know about running a professional data center, else I’d never have even known there was a down server. And to be on my 7th day of no service is completely intolerable.
I’ve been using Carbonite for > 1 year. The major problem with Carbonite is that it does not automatically backup every file type. Namely, videos. I had to go through my entire video folder and click “back up this file” one by one.
Recently I had to do a complete restoration. Unfortunately, there were video files deeply nested in my Photos folder that I did not manually add to the backup. They are now lost forever. Thanks, Carbonite.
The “Unlimited” storage space feature is puffery. If you are using Carbonite—beware.
Brian:
You bring up a great point – that Carbonite does not automatically backup videos. I suspect this is due to bandwidth issues. However, you do not need to go through your entire computer and back each video up individually.
All you need to do is right-click the video and move your cursor over the Carbonite menu option. You’ll see, “Properties.” Click on that and you’ll see an option that says, “Back up files of this type (within folders selected for backup).” Check that option and it will backup all videos of that format within that folder.
TravisVS
Site Admin
Both my law partner and I signed up for Carbonite and backed up all our stuff, which included tons of documents and pictures. When her laptop was stolen, she bought a new one and went to Carbonite to restore the stuff backed up, and they had lost all the documents!!! They had the photos, all right, but no pleadings and writings, which, for a law office, is devastating. All they could do is shrug their shoulders!! They will do more[!], but I would never go with them again under any circumstances, so it’s either Mozy or external hard backup system from now on.
@Moe:
It sounds like your needs for a backup are primarily for business. There is no doubt that there are better solutions for BUSINESS backup. Carbonite online backup is primarily for the home user that just wants a simple backup solution to protect their files – period. They aren’t targeting the hardcore technical person like yourself – or even general business applications for that matter.
I’m a perfect example of the typical Carbonite user – a home user who uses his computer a lot who already does a local backup but wants an extra layer of insurance in case the worst happens. In short, a guy who wants a simple, “set and forget” backup. That’s what Carbonite offers.
I have over 200GB of data backed up with Carbonite and I’ve been using them for over 2 years now without any issues at all. For me, it just works. I also use their remote access capabilities using their mobile apps and they work flawlessly as well.
I respect your opinion of why Carbonite doesn’t work for you, but for others reading your comments, it’s important people realize that your needs are very different from the typical user Carbonite is targeting.
TravisVS
Site Admin
This reply worries me (I’m an existing user). Home or business, how do you explain that @Moe’s documents were lost? Home users have important documents too.
I’m a computer architect and as you know Cloud Backup is not easy, everyone is claiming to be the best and sadly not all know the meaning of cloud backup, first of all, speed, carbonite is very very slow comparing to other backup software, and i will never trust my data with carbonite, we all do remember they lost their data in 2009 and ofcourse they blamed it on hardware, as a user i don’t care they should have backed up the users data, also their GUI is silly and their technology is very primitive, for example, I have 3 GB PST File, and carbonite does not support blocklevel, this is a must for online backup!!! i dont know how people are using carbonite!!!, each time I get an email carbonite takes the whole file, and again its soo slow, I did a benchmark for most of them, and going cloud means i need to access my data from anywhere any time, and as a business i need a real console application, which carbonite does not have, they have a billing web console, they call it Management!!!, Also I prefer Cloud Disater recovery to be included
I’m testing now Mozy and Timeline Cloud, and mostly will go with Timeline Cloud for 3 reasons, its faster than mozy, and does have real cloud disaster recovery and they use Amazon S3
Hope this will help
I bought a three year subscription to carbonite for “unlimited” backup on Feb. 1 2011. My 384GB of data have been uploading and spinning my disk constantly since then. As of this morning, June 13, I have 77GB of data to upload. At the present rate of 1GB per day upload speed it will be 77 more days before my photos are backed up. That is it will be 77 more days if I do not take any more 25MB photos. Since I have taken as many as 300 photos in a weekend, Carbonite will probably never catch up.
In no sense of the word is the carbonite backup “unlimited.”
@Marna:
Sorry to hear about your experience with Mozy. I guess the lesson here for everyone reading this is to check your backups on a regular basis. I have to admit I neglect to do this myself – until I read about horror stories like this. I just checked my backup with Carbonite and all my files are there. I also tried to restore a few files just as a test as well and everything was fine.
I think I will write a post about this next week as a reminder to people that you can’t just assume your backups are there. Stuff happens (for whatever reason) so you need to check them periodically.
Thanks for sharing your experience and hopefully you’ll find another provider you’ll be happy with.
TravisVS
Site Admin
Whatever you do, do NOT get Mozy for a backup service. Just this week I went to recover my files for two computers and everything was gone except the bookmarks for both computers! I had backed on their site for several years, and in recent months I had a lot of trouble trying to even sign into the site. I tried to get tech support but you have to have some tech number, I couldn’t get into the tech page to do anything. I even called the corporate office for help and got no reply! I filled out a problem form online, but they didn’t even get back to me right away. I even had trouble just trying to download my bookmarks, everything else was lost! I had even made recent backups, but according to the website they showed I hadn’t had any activity in about a year! I lost photos and research and things I wasn’t able to backup in another way, especially recently. BAD SERVICE do not use Mozy. I had originally had unlimited storage and I think when they changed the limit they wiped out all my files. I wasn’t close to the limit with my two computers.
I just faced this choice for my external hard drive when Mozy came up for renewal — it can’t handle 350gb of media. I’ve looked into a premium streaming/synch service called my pogoplug that saves your media to allow sharing of media, but if your desktop or external hard drive crashes, the presumably you can’t synch…dropbox, etc.. have similar issues?? windows live??
suggestions welcome
@Paul:
Ya, I’m not to thrilled with Mozy’s new pricing structure either. It makes you wonder if Carbonite will be following suit.
At any rate, Carbonite doesn’t backup external hard drives directly. I’m not sure if mapping your hard drive to a directory will work or not. Carbonite has a free trial for 15 days so before you commit to a subscription, give the free trial a shot and see if your method works. And then let me know how it goes;)
Thanks,
TravisVS
Site Admin
I have been using Mozy for several years, but their new pricing plan makes their service unaffordable for me. I currently backup over 250GB (digital photos and videos) and it increases monthly. My current contract with them is good until June 2012, so I have some time to research an alternative.
I had looked at Carbonite before choosing Mozy, and I believe I was able to backup an external hard drive with Carbonite by mapping the hard drive to a directory using Disk Management within Windows.
There is one glaring flaw in Carbonite that very few people know about…unfortunately I now do. It resulted in 18 months of lost data. To make a long story short, if you restore your PC to an earlier date, like when you ghost image your disk or set a restore point, if you have Carbonite on the restored image, you will lose any new files or modifications to existing files that were made after the date you made the restore image. In other words if you “go back” in time to say June 2010, you just lost anything Carbonite saved after June 2010. The problem is that when I restored the PC disk image, Carbonite fired itself up as always, and sent its June 2010 snapshot and list of backup files to the server. This overwrote the server’s catalog of my backups which had been current up to April 2011. The client tells the server what the file backup image is!?!? You’ve got to be kidding. The server should always control the file backup list for just such a scenario!! No problem I thought…their website says that any accidentally deleted files are saved for 30 days. Nope. After several rounds with tech support, I was told there was nothing to retrieve. This was just four days after the problem occurred. I was dumbfounded. This is so common a scenario (restoring to an earlier image) as to be laughable that they never considered this. Carbonite ONLY is good if your disk crashes and you bring up a whole new system WITHOUT Carbonite running or installed. Of course had I known what was about to happen, I would have first retrieved my files to another PC via their web interface, but too late now. As a software engineer, I can say that such a “hole” in their product makes me wonder what else doesn’t work. So maybe it works fine if you start from scratch, but you won’t find anywhere on their tech notes any warnings about restoring your PC to an earlier image. I’m guessing I was the guinea pig here. They screwed me over big time and for the two years I’d had the service, it turns out I got absolutely nothing when I needed it most.
@Steve:
Thanks for the head’s up. I have made a note of it. We’ll be doing a review of it soon. Thanks for sharing. I appreciate it.
TravisVS
Site Admin
KeepVault online backup is a worthy competitor to both Mozy and Carbonite. I find it faster and more flexible than both of these
@Dana:
Carbonite does not backup external hard drives, unfortunately. Mozy does, but it doesn’t have unlimited storage and is more expensive. If you can get by with Mozy’s 50GB plan and you use my exclusive 15% discount, it would be just a few dollars more than Carbonite.
TravisVS
Site Admin
Your company comes highly recommended. I have eight years of legal documents stored on my external hard drive. From what I’ve read, you do not backup external hard drives. Is this possible?
Please respond quickly, as I am planning to make a decision and get it set up this weekend while I have time.