Mozy, a popular online backup service, released a version for the Macintosh to much blogger fanfare a few weeks ago. I’ve been trying it since then, and I’m unimpressed. The service is slow. I’m on high bandwidth connections at home and at work, and I’ve yet to complete a backup. I’ve configured it to only send just a portion of my HD: approximately 25 GB (which is only a quarter of my hard drive). I think it’s safe to assume this is a good test number, since you really shouldn’t back up the entire drive necessarily anyway–just the data that’s irreplaceable, like personal documents and photos.

So, in two weeks, Mozy has only been able to upload about 6.8 GB. Plus, occasionally when it fails, it strands some big log files on my MacBook Pro. Is Mozy only meant to back up small portions of data (< 1 GB)? They promote unlimited storage (if you buy a membership, though it’s inexpensive), so I can’t imagine this is the case.

I know that once there’s a full snapshot of data on their server, then Mozy speeds up the process by making incremental backups only of files that have been added or changed on the client side. Still, it’s been two weeks and I don’t even have that initial snapshot ready.

So, now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just get a cheap, but big, shared web hosting account and just move backups there manually (or do some fancy rsync).

At any rate, I can’t recommend Mozy for the Mac unfortunately, and I’m going to cancel my membership. It’s too slow and kludgey for me right now. I’d love to hear if others out there have had success with it.