The Mozy Debacle – from the perspective of a “Rotten Apple” [Archive]

I’ve been a Mozy user for a few years now. Their unlimited backup plan was a big draw for me and their software made it pretty easy to backup the data that I wanted to. The best part was a flat rate for an unlimited back plan. Perfect! In fact, I did a LOT of research before I signed up to insure there were no hidden costs or upper limits to the amount of data I could back up. And it’s not like I have an excessive amount of data to protect. My current load is about 160GB. I backup my movie files to an external drive, saving bandwidth for more important files like pictures and documents and my music (can’t live without the music)! The beauty of an unlimited backup plan is you don’t really have to worry about your backups. And that’s what Mozy was offering.
The problem is, Mozy has changed their pricing structure. And they did it pretty much over night. 3 days ago MozyTweeted about the “newly announced plans” detailing the change in their service. The worst part of the whole mess was that there was no warning (for users with accounts renewing on Feb 1 or 2 they really had no chance. Many woke up to canceled accounts) and Mozy attempting to blame their USERS for the fiasco. In a brilliant quote for PC Mag writer Michael Muchmore, Mozy vice president of product marketing said that

“three out of four of its customers’ accounts stay well below 50GB, a minority of rotten apples who take the ‘unlimited’ at face value have spoiled it for the rest of the bunch by uploading terabytes of digital video, photos, and music.”

You’ve got to be kidding me! Mozy is actually blaming their USERS for USING the service and causing these issues! My wife reminded me of the AOL mess years ago when they got upset that their users were on the internet too much and asked them to get off. AOL never recovered. Mozy is quite possibly looking at a repeat of that event. Only time will tell.
My backup costs tripled in the last three days thanks to Mozy. As for me, I’m already transferring all my data to Crashplan. If you agree and think Mozy has violated the trust of their users, you should do the same.
Goodbye Mozy,
from a “Rotten Apple”

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ADMIN: Please note – this article has been reposted from the old blog. The comments from that post are copied over here. Please feel free to comment further below.

Submitted by meulfire on Wed, 02/02/2011 – 17:24.
Wow, I didn’t catch the PCMag article… that’s a great quote!
Also interesting in their Twittering on the issue is some mis-information (http://twitter.com/mozy/status/32505338343202819). They say that “Some [will] pay less”, while the email I got says 50GB starts at $5.99/mo; a dollar more than the old unlimited plan. ’tis going to cost more for EVERYONE.
Why did you chose Crashplan over Backblaze?
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That’s funny!

Submitted by Hackety on Fri, 02/04/2011 – 10:55.
That’s funny! I missed the paying less piece. NO one paid less… good grief.
Crashplan had an awesome setup. I chose Crashplan because of the software offered, good cloud backup and no bandwidth caps. Backblaze offers all those except the software side. CP supports linux (which I’m not currently backing up, but would like to have that option) as well as the 3x backup. Basically I can backup to a local HDD, a friends computer off site and their cloud storage. All in one neat little package! I’m sure Backblaze is awesome, but Crashplans options sold it for me. I bought backups for a year!

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Submitted by Steve – MozyPR on Thu, 02/17/2011 – 13:13.
I’m Steve from Mozy and just wanted to clarify a couple things that were said here. First, that’s incorrect that MozyHome now costs more for everyone. There is a good chunk of our customers with multiple computers being backed up who are now paying *less* with the new plan.
Also, the writer of the PC Mag article you referred to did not mean for his “rotten apple” comment to be directly attributed to Mozy – as those were his words, not ours. When we called his attention to it he immediately removed those words from this story online, and the corrected version became live that day – here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379229,00.asp
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Submitted by Hackety on Sat, 02/19/2011 – 16:04.
Thank you for your response Steve. I’m glad you took the time to respond here. It marks the first logical response I’ve seen from Mozy on the whole matter. I see your logic in regards to the cost being “less” for some customers but the idea of a “good chunk” is really impossible to prove, that is unless you were willing to release data regarding users who stayed, saved money etc. I know this is not a reality, nor do I expect you do release that kind of data, so we’ll just have to let that one go.
It’s unfortunate that the article was written incorrectly. I’m leaving my post above as it’s reflective of the article as it was written and I think better reflects the reaction to Mozy’s decision. While the exact wordage from the PCMag article didn’t actually reflect Mozy’s exact words, your blog post regarding the change does elude to users being the problem and the solution is to move to a tiered system which you now have done. The decision was ultimately yours and I trust it was thoroughly thought out. 

In the long run it worked out for both of us. You got me to recommend users to you for almost a year and a half and in the end decided I wasn’t really the customer you were looking for so I moved on and found CrashPlan to be a much better fit for my needs. With local, remote and cloud backup options I’m now more protected than I was with Mozy, and I never would have known had you not jacked up the price to use your service. Thank you.