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Amazon Just Made it Harder

by Josh Kenzer on May 1st, 2007

I downloaded and installed Mozy yesterday. Mozy gives users 2GB of storage to backup their files for free. You can upgrade to the unlimited version of Mozy for $4.95 per month. I really like the application and the features of it. It is a full service backup tool.

However, Amazon offers online storage as part of their S3 web services. The way they charge is a little different. They charge a monthly fee for the amount of space you are taking up on their servers as well as a monthly fee for data transfer. With two fees compared to Mozy’s one, you would think Mozy would be the cheaper alternative. Except that Amazon is dirt cheap. They charge $0.15 per GB of space used and, with their lower price going into effect as of June 1st, charge only $0.10 per GB uploaded (there is a tiered fee for downloading data that ranges from $0.13 to $0.18 per GB). That means for a backup solution, you’re costs will be front loaded but month over month costs should be cheaper. For $4.95 per month, you can house 33GB of data a month – assuming no uploading or downloading. And since you only pay for what you use, you may not have need to backup 33GB – making it cheaper than Mozy in the long run.

This is unless you have more than 33GB of data. If you have more than that, use Mozy. And if you have less than 2GB of data, use Mozy (it’s free). So, the Amazon sweet spot is between 2GB and 33GB. This is what’s making it hard. I’m in the Amazon sweet spot. But I don’t want to have to change my backup plan when I reach 33GB. Arg!

As for the software, for Amazon I’m using Jungle Disk. The nice thing about Jungle Disk is it lets you not only run incremental backups on change files, but it lets you mount the S3 service as a drive on your Mac.

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  • Thom, I have a high capacity hard drive, but I find I'm not very diligent about it. The nice thing about Mozy and Jungle Disk is they back up in the background without me having to remember. The other factor is that I am solely on a laptop. It's rare that I even bother connecting my laptop to the drive.

    John, thanks for the tip.
  • John
    I used to use Mozy on the PC and I've just switched to the new Mac version. I'm currently using it for the important but often forgotten things as it just does it itself.

    2Gig has been plenty for that, but if you’re signing up for a free account you should try to use a referal code that’ll give you an extra 256 meg on top of the free 2 gig.

    e.g. https://mozy.com/?ref=G7GNPN
  • Hey great post, and a good job comparing Mozy.coma and S3. I am a fan of Mozy, but I also realize the cost of storage is greater beyond the 2GB limit.

    I have a question though. I noticed your intent was backing up data. Why wouldn't you just purchase one or more high capacity hard drives for backup? Is the ability to get the files anywhere the draw? If you're simply looking for a high capacity backup solution, wouldn't a $200 drive suffice?
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