PC Computer Backup: Mozy is superior to Backblaze (October, 2009)

We all fear the day when our computer crashes and we lose all our files, so we have to back it up. But who remembers to do that and who wants to? Messing with removable drives and remembering to do it are just some of the concerns. Also if something happens to your home, such as theft or fire, you lose everything anyway. That is just too much to deal with and too much risk.

When I found out about these online backup programs for $5 per month that backup everything on your computer constantly to an online service, I was excited but skeptical. My first thoughts were “does this really work?” and “how difficult is it to maintain?” While I love technology I hate difficulty. With technology getting smarter, easier, and simpler every day, I jump on every “set it and forget it” solution I can find.

Asking and searching around for the popular services I stumbled across Mozy (www.mozy.com) and Backblaze (www.backblaze.com). Both are about $5 per month for unlimited real-time online backup. Now that is a deal. Both were simple to install, just download and click go. As far as ease of use and getting the job done I thought both these programs were great. But being skeptical I had to do some rigorous testing of these. After all, if I am going to trust these services with all my files and data, they better work right.

I was hoping to find comparison and test information searching the internet and reading forums but to no avail. I didn’t want to sign up for both of these services and do all the research if I could find the answers I was looking for, but many tests were done a long time ago and no good recent information could be found.

Here is where I’m going to get a bit technical. You can take my word for it that Mozy is the winner and just stop here, but if you’re into computers and want to know why, read on.

Philosophy: One big difference between Mozy and Backblaze is the philosophy. With Mozy you select what you want to backup, while with Backblaze they backup everything on the computer without asking. That is great, but Mozy’s default selections showed 133GB on my computers and Backblaze only showed 99GB. Backblaze excludes a lot of files by default such as virtual machine files, ISO files, EXE files, the program files directory, and many more. I guess they are assuming that I have those files backed up somewhere else. Well you know what they say about assumption.

I am giving this to Mozy hands down. What Mozy didn’t select by default was my operating system and programs, similar to Backblaze, but they didn’t have a list of exclusions. Mozy was smart enough to detect some financial data files in the program files directory. I think power has to be given to selection here as these systems can’t possibly know everything about your computer. Winner: Mozy.

Security: Mozy automatically secured all files prior to uploading them to Mozy with a 448-bit encryption key. Backblaze requires this to be configured and used AES but didn’t offer any insight on their algorithms. I like that Mozy by default took the safer selection with security and encrypted my data. Winner: Mozy.

Speed: I thought the speed was pretty close. Both programs took about week to backup my 100GB or so. I am using a Comcast cable connection. Winner: Tie.

Bandwidth Efficiency: This was the meat and potatoes of the whole deal. I am greedy with my internet speed and bandwidth. I don’t like sharing it, especially with a backup service that is running in the background making my internet slow. So that backup service better “get in and get out” as they say. Well, let’s take a large file example. Say I have a mail storage file of 1GB or 2GB, and I put a new e-mail in there and now it is 2.01GB. The smart program will upload .01 GB in just a minute. The not so smart one will upload the whole 2GB file again thinking it is completely different, thus wasting many hours of bandwidth and slowing down the internet speed. Not to mention if you change it a lot you may never stay ahead of the backup game as it will constantly be re-uploading.

This is where Mozy’s block level file technology comes into play. I was surprised to see Backblaze upload the entire file again. Mozy only uploaded the blocks that changed. This was fast, efficient, and satisfying. Winner: Mozy.

Functionality: Remember when I said both programs did the job? Well, the devil is in the details. Let’s say you like to leave a file open on your computer. I like to use the e-mail example because a lot of us leave our e-mail open, such as Microsoft Outlook, IMAP client, maybe our favorite Excel file, financial program, or even a picture database. Well when you leave files open that usually means other programs can’t access them, such as these online backup programs. What’s even worse is sometimes you may close a program or file, but it stays open in the background and you don’t even know about it! An example of this is the MobileMe I have running by Apple. It likes to leave my Outlook process running even though I close Outlook so it can maintain synchronization between my Outlook and iPhone. This means the Outlook.exe process is still locking my files leaving them out of reach to other processes.

Thoroughly testing this, Backblaze just would not budge on my open files. It would not start backing them up until everything was properly closed. This means I had to be aware of everything going on with my PC and what may or may not be locking my files without my knowledge.

In comes Mozy to the rescue with the ability to leverage snapshots through Microsoft’s VSS (Virtual Shadow Service). This service snapshots open files and allows them to be uploaded. It even combines with the block level file technology so it can snap only the block difference in the file. This is a great combination of efficiency and functionality.

So, I may have been in the dark with Backblaze considering I leave my computer on months at a time and don’t want to worry about situations such as MobileMe and what it’s locking on my computer. I have to give Mozy the hands down win on this one too. The “set it and forget it” on Mozy is not only working, it is working smart. Winner: Mozy.

Consideration: Mozy did not arbitrarily decide when to start my backups like its Backblaze cousin who randomly decided to back things up when it wanted to. Mozy would wait until my activity was idle for 20 minutes before starting. It didn’t want to disturb me. It also made sure my processor usage was under 60% so if I was running something and away from the machine, it would wait until that completed. Thank you Mozy I wasn’t expecting that. Winner: Mozy.

Information: How important is information to technology? VERY. I want to know what, when, where, why, and how much at all times. Similar to a bank statement – if the bank takes my money I want to know why and what for. I treat my information the same way. If I just changed a file and run a backup, there should be somewhere I can find out what just happened, how it happened, how long it took, whether it succeeded or failed, and maybe even some notes if something out of the ordinary occurred.

Backblaze shows none of this. If you run a backup you are lucky to see any information aside from a note stating “backup complete”. Where is the information? Maybe a log file? I sure couldn’t find it in the program or poking around the directory structure. I guess that isn’t important. That could make tech support easy and reduce liability I guess. I suppose if I have nothing to show for what happened, Backblaze can say it never did… or did it? That is a little scary.

Mozy more than delivers. It shows all the history, the backups that ran, the files that got backed up, the path, the size of the file (or the patch size of the file, which is the difference in the block level), the time it took to encrypt the file, transfer it, and what the internet transfer rate was at the time. It even has that little notes field I like for informational statements. Winner: Mozy.

Conclusion: These programs have come a long way. People take their data very seriously and these programs have to match up with those expectations.

Who would I trust right now with backing up my information efficiently, quickly, accurately, and securely? Winner: Mozy.