Online backup and storage service Mozy has quietly grown to 175,000 customers since launching in April 2006. That’s not bad for the Utah-based company that runs the service, Berkeley Data Systems, which raised just $2 million in venture capital back in 2005. The company went big time today, however, when they announced a multi-million dollar deal with General Electric, which bought MozyPro (the enterprise version of Mozy) for all of its 300,000+ worldwide employees.
MozyPro is similar to the consumer Mozy service, but includes server backups, 24/7 support and admin control for the IT department. The service launched last December and 3,200 businesses are now using. GE is now one of those businesses.
Mozy and MozyPro are administered through a desktop client and automatically backs up data on the PC every two hours. Thirty days worth of versions are retained, and users can go back and restore any of those versions.
Rate card pricing for consumers is free for up to 2GB of storage, and $5/month for unlimited storage. Businesses pay $4/month for each employee, plus $0.50/GB/month of stored data. Bandwidth is free. As a side note, GE certainly didn’t pay rate card rates - a deal this large would have a substantial discount.
The company is backed by Wasatch Partners, Tim Draper and Drew Major. They have 25 employees.
We first mentioned Mozy back in 2006 when we covered the major online storage providers. On the consumer side, Mozy competes with Carbonite and others. At the enterprise level, Iron Mountain and EVault are the entrenched competitors, although Mozy says they have a 10x cost advantage over those services. Google and Microsoft will also have products in this space.
A very large untapped market for online backups are the OEM PC manufacturers, who should be providing a free trial with every PC. Mozy is now positioned nicely to land such a deal. After a grueling due diligence process by GE, the PC guys should be confident that Mozy is as secure as their competitors. And charging 1/10 of what they do is great for the bottom line.
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unlimited for 5$/month, whoa thats a good deal, sounds like to good to be true ?
With digital cameras I can easily generate 100G a month, I can imagine they would give me a TB every year !
Congrats to a small player landing the big fish. I love seeing stuff like this.
I use these guys at home and they rock. I didn’t realize they had something for my business. I gotta check this out for my office. If it’s as good as the home version, i’m on board.
I agree with Ronald, hats off to these guys for getting the GE deal. It’s great to see small guys win big. Keep up the good work, Mozy!
wow, very clever, I get it now…
it is 5$/month/machine, and it is backing up what is on my machine, so they will not back up anymore data than I can hold on my machine, so if I want them to back up a TB, I need a TB on my machine…
still a pretty good offer though
Beng I think they do that knowing that your ISP would likely shut you down uploading 100GB a month. But I’m not certain.
In any case it’s a real heartwarming story for the day, I would love to have seen them when they got the news. Par-tay.
Ah just saw your new post, that would limit it too. So no network backups for home I assume. Which is good, because there’s no way they’d stay alive backing up TBs for $5 a month.
It’s not really a big surprise - Mozy is by far the best solution out there, GE just made the logical decision…
Congrats to Mozy. GE is notorious for not paying much. They openly tell you things like “We are GE, we didn’t get to where we got by paying much to our suppliers”. One reason they like small companies is they can squeeze them hard, promising things like a press release (this is an example!). So I would be surprised if Mozy got more than a million dollar out of GE.
OK, this sounds like a perfect solution
But do they solve the Outlook .pst backup problem I currently have with my external drive backup?
ie., I always have Outlook open and it cannot backup unless I remember to close the application.
I have this problem with both my Terastation backup software and standard MS backup included with XP pro. I remember to close it down about 1 in 10 times which means my average backup is for e-mail is about 5 weeks old. . .
Another thing that probably helps mozy, especially with a customer like GE.
If mozy is doing the latest rage in backup … de-duping … imagine in a company like GE how many copies of the same PPT, DOC, PDF, etc are scattered across employees systems. Some of these de-duping back services/devices claim 100 to 1 reduction in storage required, just by getting rid of all the dupes. Of course, the bigger the company and the more dupes, the better.
Kudos to mozy.
johnh: Mozy can back up open files like outlook pst.
I’ve taken a look at mozy before. They offer a great service and they have some of the smartest people I know working on their service. Looks very promising.
Way to go Mozy…keep it up.
It’s not really unlimited storage, its limited by the size of your hard disk, since if you delete a file from your computer, so will mozy. So assuming you have a 100GB disk typically, that’s what you’ll have in terms of storage.
I tried the mozypro service several months ago and it was too slow to be usable. It took something like 12 hours to upload about 20MB of my data!!! With a 50GB drive, it would have taken months for it to backup everything, actually our service probably accumulates data faster than mozy uploads it, and I never tried the download! Perhaps its faster now.
It’s true that Mozy was really slow months ago, but fortunately that’s not the case now! I think their Windows application is Mozy’s weakest point. Each update of the software requires a reboot, sometimes it doesn’t backup your files for whatever reason and it doesn’t even retry, startup is painfully slow.
They claim that they can backup PST files, but it seems that it requires a shutdown of Outlook, which will never work for me as it is always on and checks my mailboxes every 5 minutes.
I just signed up with Mozy about 2 weeks ago and now have 3 computers backed up with them. It took about a week for me to get 15GB backed up but I’m pretty sure it would have taken that long with any service.
Now that the initial backup is done I do not even notice Mozy doing anything which is nice. I don’t have to think about it and my important items are backed up.
Congrats on landing the big deal!
I’m using Mozy’s for OS X (beta) and it rocks. I’m not backing up everything, but just the important stuff and I’m under their 2GB limit (FREE). I think it’s a great service. I’ll probably upgrade to more later.
MikeInAz @16
I want to try the Mac beta as well … how do I get signed up?
Mozy is a cool service and it is ranked 4th place at the online backup companies list at the review site:
BackupReview.info
This site is an excellent website for online backup information, news and articles. It lists more than 400 online backup companies and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.
It also interviews executives and senior management people from the industry.
well done mozy!
Funny that the homepage shows a macbook but they don’t have a mac version that’s PUBLIC yet…
I can’t wait to use this on my other machines though - well done Mozy for landing the big fish!
Long time reader, [mumbled]-th time poster…
Our service is in private beta, so hopefully this isn’t considered a plug, but I’m just so happy to be able to talk about it after being under wraps for so long that I wanted to post
http://www.spn.com
(Symantec Protection Network)
Online Backup is the first of many services we plan to offer. It’s not Norton 360 (that’s our consumer offering), but rather a service built from the ground up for reliability for the SMB+. You can sign up for an invitation & request more info at our site, and I’ll try to keep an eye out for TC regulars when the doors are pried open a bit more
Richard Goodwin
Sr Product Mgr
booo.. hisss.. booo..
TechCrunch is the place to read about exciting, innovative new technologies. Not shameless plugs from the old sk00l .
Congrats Mozy guys on yet another big win. I’ve been wondering when Mike was going to cover you guys.
Now when is that Mac client coming out???
I’m currently using JungleDisk + Amazon S3. Amazon says the data is mirrored accross multiple servers and JungleDisk encrypts everything, so I feel my data is secure.
Now, Mozy looks pretty interesting in terms of cost and ease-of-use. Can anybody comment on their reliability (can I trust them with data I can’t afford to lose?) and security (can I trust them with sensitive data?) ?
If I buy two 250gb hard-drives, will Mozy provide me with backup for 500gbs for $4.95/month?
I’m hoping it sounds so good and is true instead of…
I work at GE and we have not heard of this company at all, so I would say that “all 300,000 employees” of GE are not using Mozy. Currently, I know that at least two of the 6 GE businesses do not use this software (or any sort of backup mechanism). We use 250GB USB external hard drives for “backup.”
Ian - It sounds like they just inked the deal. A contract of that size will take months, if not years to roll out.
Geoff,
Not everything from a big company is old sk00l
When I can talk more about the technology, I’ll be glad to discuss it here in more detail and we can put it on the 1337-o-meter.
Now, more importantly, Heroes is back on
I also use Amazon S3 plus an application called S3 Backup for this…
Now I am thinking about Switching…
Does anyone know if Mozy stores the data in multiple geographic locations?
way to go Mozy!
I was looking at Mozy yesterday and wow, what a deal. I’ll have to give them a try.
Well done Mozy. Now lots of big players are coming in this field. There will be much more competitive rates for users.
http://www.suggestusability.com
A couple things…..
Mozy is funded by Wasatch Venture Fund, not Wasatch Partners.
And (in response to a comment) it does have a Mac client available in beta. You have to request it, but it works like a charm.
That’s very impressive. I guess the online backup business will get even hotter. But honestly speaking, I am surprised Mozy gets the deal. There are a lot of better companies, more established, with better products and services. A lot of people and myself prefer DriveHQ and iBackup. They’ve got more features, more enterprise ready backup software and is financially more established. Anyway, I guess this is a mixed thing for Mozy users. Mozy probably will survive with the deal, but consumers could be dumped as it doesn’t generate revenue for them.
You can try drivehq online backup which can backup locked files including Outlook.pst.
The url is: http://www.drivehq.com/downloads/downloads.aspx
April 23rd, 2007 at 3:13 pm
OK, this sounds like a perfect solution
But do they solve the Outlook .pst backup problem I currently have with my external drive backup?
ie., I always have Outlook open and it cannot backup unless I remember to close the application.
I have this problem with both my Terastation backup software and standard MS backup included with XP pro. I remember to close it down
Alex asked at 6:36 pm:
“Now, Mozy looks pretty interesting in terms of cost and ease-of-use. Can anybody comment on their reliability (can I trust them with data I can’t afford to lose?) and security (can I trust them with sensitive data?) ?”
In paragraph 3 of the article at the top of the page, right above the graphic, it says “Mozy and MozyPro are administered through a desktop client and automatically backs up data on the PC every two hours. Thirty days worth of versions are retained, and users can go back and restore any of those versions.”
This is one reason why I would hesitate to use Mozy: if anything older than 30 days is deleted, then I would lose a lot of stuff I have that is several years old that I would want to keep - family photos, for example.
Others here have asked interesting questions, like “Does anyone know if Mozy stores the data in multiple geographic locations?”
and “If I buy two 250gb hard-drives, will Mozy provide me with backup for 500gbs for $4.95/month?”
Here’s a question of my own. What about those users who are not always online, those who switch off their machines at night? Does one need to be permanently on to take advantage of Mozy?
Finally, well done on landing the GE account. Ian, if you haven’t heard about it yet, I’m sure you soon will.
Way to go Mozy! Enterprise is where $$ are, albeit long sales cycles.
This is very impressive. Any insider connection between Mozy, its VCs & GE?
Eventually, there’s going to be a limit here, and machines are just going to arrive with RAID. It has to decrease in usefulness as file sizes increase.
I have been using these guys for quite a while now and am extremely pleased with them and the fact that they are continuing to grow. Their pricing and service is great and I am glad to see they will be around for a while (or so it seems).
Great to hear!
I am a user and know their technology well.
First of all, be aware of “full” vs “diffs”. Mozy does an initial full backup of user files. Based on the unbreakable laws of physics, that may take some time. However, future weekly backups are “diffs”…They only back up block changes, and new files that were stored. It’s probably not the right service for the professional videographer ingesting 100GB/week, especially given that person has terrestrial backups (tapes) and serious local disk infrastructure.
For the other 99.9% of us, Mozy is awesome.
In terms of reliability, they use a custom storage design that is derived from past commercial work. It will tolerate multiple simultaneous failures of components without data loss. It is more reliable *and* more economical than the stuff connected.com or evault has deployed. The real differentiator is interface and design…It just works.
Congratulations to Josh and team. GE is big news, but even bigger news is the pace at which they have been signing up channel partners.
@Mikey
It would be nice if they disclosed a bit more about their infrastructure. I’d like to know my data isn’t being stored on a single hard-drive.
Can anyone comment on how it’s financially feasible to put-up with the storage and bandwidth usage of a client paying $4.95 who stores at least 80gb.
What about other online data storage services, like ElephantDrive? I’m currently one of their customers, and some of the questions that people have posed here concerning security and speed, in particular, are pretty neatly answered by their services. Sure, it’s slightly more expensive, but, the speed of backup was seriously impressive, in addition to the security of storing data in different physical locations. (with automated backup, and saved older versions of files). In addition to this, you can share files with other users, which is pretty sweet–both for small businesses, and, just for filesharing in general.
11. Jonathan:
johnh: Mozy can back up open files like outlook pst.
====
Great. How are they on restore?
36 Jon:
Eventually, there’s going to be a limit here, and machines are just going to arrive with RAID. It has to decrease in usefulness as file sizes increase.
====
Still doesn’t solve the fire, power-surge, or burglary problem.
First off, kudos to them for the deal. It’s huge no matter what the value. Way to go!
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned time to restore for these services. It’s one
thing to wait for a month to have your data backed up, it’s another to wait a week to get it back. There’s no such thing as “incremental” restore.
Our take on the problem is to allow you to backup to a destination of your choosing. On-site, near off-site, and far off-site are all supported. Best of all, there are no monthly fees if you backup to someone you know.
Your destination is more secure, less expensive, and faster to restore if disaster strikes. (i.e. laptop theft.)
Sorry to be a nay-sayer, but I have had some real bumps with Mozy — they have some quality issues to contend with. They push out upgrades to their client software very frequently, and one last week hosed my computer (pegged CPU at 100%) — it took me hours to find and debug the problem, and then I had to reinstall Mozy and reupload all my files — it is still chugging way on my 65GB of backups a week later. $50 is cheap, but my time is expensive.
And as a veteran of several startups that got the **big deal** with the **giant customer** and suffered for it, I also know that can be the path to ruin, so I’d advise folks to be careful out there.
Why are the “veterans” always so bitter? It’s pretty simple - develop the best software and the customers will come. Congratulations on the huge win Mozy!
We have been using Mozy for about a year on all of our PC’s in the office. They won my love when they released their MAC version about a month ago (beta) it has worked flawlessly and in my mind that is what puts them way ahead of their competition.
Sign up for the 2gig trial and you will fall in love and upgrade. They have nailed it.
Congrats on the Big press Mozy Crew
anthropocentric …I know I am a bit behind the 8-ball on letting you know this, but Mozy DOES NOT back up to multiple locations. They only have one data center in Utah that they back up to.
I would say that they do not practice what they preach, any company that is serious about themselves would at least show that by using their own service. They are a great solution for a home user, but a business that requires redundant backups can not use them.
Use this registration code “WMA5BB” when you sign up and the referrer and the referee both get an extra 256 Mb of space. Pretty cool!
#47 John, I certainly don’t know if they have multiple locations, but isn’t it hard to think GE would have signed the deal without it?
As for Outlook concers, it bakes up locked pst files, and just as importantly it only needs to back up the changed portion. Your outlook.pst may be 200MB or so, and most other programs would back up the whole thing if you receive one email or change a contact record. The Mozy backup will be just a fraction of that.
Mozy is the best backup software out there. I love it. Though they need to lower their prices (perhaps they should host their backups on Amazon’s S3).