My first tech support request, which came within a day of using it, went unresponded to for about 5 days. That was not the only time an inordinate delay for tech support occurred.

But the main problem was, the software just did NOT work! I signed up at the end of January, and here in early April, Mozy has not succeeded in backing up my 60 GB of data! I have had it running several times daily. The software kept quitting, or connecting but failing to actually upload anything. I exchanged email with multiple tech support people, and went through about 5 upgrades, each upgrade promising to fix the problem that was stopping me from uploading data.

I cancelled today after an upgrade to the most recent version failed to work at all, despite several uninstall/reinstall procedures.

IMHO, Mozy for Mac is not even reliable enough to qualify for a Beta test status. I do personally know ONE Mozy for Mac user for whom this actually seems to work. He is happy. But it seems possible from internet reviews that he is in the minority.

In response to my repeated attempts to problem-solve for Mozy, they extended my contract by 2 months, for free. But I found that the amount of time I was spending trying to get Mozy to work was not worth “free,” even.

Good luck to Mozy, and I hope they get their sluggish technical support times improved, and that someday they have a product worthy of marketing to the Mac community. We Mac users expect better.

And I definitely understand the desire for offsite backup. Time Machine won’t help if a power surge or lightning strike or fire takes out your external HDD along with your Mac. Offsite is not as fast, so it should be a backup of your backup (so to speak). I have had a few issues with the Mac beta of Mozy, like the fact that it has stopped making backups for the last ten days, but support is fairly responsive. Between the wife and I we have three separate machines with them.

You may not be knocking Mozy, but I am. I totally get what you’re saying, and agree SuperDuper! is the way to go, just waiting for it to be Leopard ready. It’s why I ended up Migrating from an external set up thanks to SuperDuper! And as far as pulling files out of the fire, I think box.net does a much better job.

Lemme see if I understand you correctly. You felt that the most efficient way to get your data and settings back to Leopard after doing a clean install was to use a *beta* online backup storage client that doesn’t even purport to support Leopard yet? That’s more efficient than using SuperDuper and a fw drive, how exactly?

I’m not knocking mozy (although the perpetual beta and the fact that it started filling my hd up with temp files prompted me to abandon it altogether), but c’mon be real, it’s not a casual “quickie” push/pull solution for migrating data. It’s for getting your files out of the fire so to speak.

With Leopard and Time Machine, things have changed a bit. I now use Time Machine for both my incremental backups and also to restore in case of hardware failure. Time Machine is infinitely easier to set up and restore from than rsync ever was, with only a few minor tradeoffs. I like that I can restore my Time Machine backups directly from the Leopard installer disc.

I think some testing of Time Machine is deserved before you condemn it as a poor solution. It’s only a disk hog if you let it. Time Machine only backs up changed data since the previous backup. If you change lots of big files, that can result in large backups, however if you change smaller items or fewer items, backups are quite a bit smaller. Time Machine also scales as large as your backup volume is. If you only dedicate a 120GB backup volume for 75GB of data, Time Machine will just have to start deleting files earlier than if you had a 500GB drive. They’re still valid backups, they just don’t span as far back in time as if you had a larger drive. Any way you use Time Machine, it seems to be better than SuperDuper in many categories. I really like incremental backups, as I don’t always notice incorrect things right away, but I also like easy to restore backups. SuperDuper backups are super easy to restore from, but are not incremental at all.

I do have a few minor complaints about TM. I wish I could configure how many hours/days/weeks backups it could do (instead of the default 24 hours/30 dailies/weeklies until drive space runs out). I would also like to be able to configure how often it backs up and when. And finally, I would like to have two concurrent TM backups, in case my backup drive fails.

Overall, I think you’ll be impressed with TM. It’s not perfect, but it’s by far the easiest and friendliest backup method I’ve ever used.