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MozyHome stiffs unlimited users

Delivers unasked-for innovation – and a price rise

MozyHome, EMC's cloud backup service for consumers, is changing its free unlimited backup plan to a paid-for service. Now you get 2GB for free, after which you pay for data. Users are angry and competitors like LiveDrive salivating.

Mozy said it had been forced to institute charging because users were backing up significantly more data, specifically higher-resolution photos and videos.

The minimum price is $5.99/month. The charges were detailed in an emailed letter to MozyHome customers from Harel Kodesh, Mozy's president:

Dear Mozy Customer,

Thanks for being a valued Mozy subscriber. For the first time since 2006, we’re adjusting the price of our MozyHome service and wanted to give you a heads-up. As part of this change, we’re replacing our MozyHome Unlimited backup plan and introducing the following tiered storage plans:

50GB for $5.99 per month (includes backup for one computer) 125GB for $9.99 per month (includes backup for up to three computers).

You may add additional computers (up to five in total) or 20GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.

While this policy takes effect for new MozyHome customers starting today, your MozyHome Unlimited subscription is still valid for the duration of your current monthly term. In order to ensure uninterrupted service, you'll need to select a new renewal plan.

As the leader in online backup, we’re committed to continually providing the highest levels of service and protection that you’ve come to expect from us as well as delivering those innovations you’ve been asking for. For more information on the factors that led to this change, please read my note or visit our FAQ.

Be safe,
Harel Kodesh President

The charges for existing users take effect from 1 March this year. There will still be a free service to backup up to 2GB of data.

An angry user contacted us, saying: "Mozy to end unlimited and cap at 125GB within a month, bastards." There is a 440-post thread about this on the Mozy support forum.

Poster NhiKo wrote:

Backup is about trust, confidence ...

Basically Mozy is saying "our business model is not good enough to sustain the service offered, so we have to charge you more". Sorry, I cannot trust you anymore.

I'm a happy customer since 2006, you saved irreplaceable photos of my kids after a RAID huge failure ... I've recommended you do literally dozens of people.

I was so happy with the "streaming" recovering utility ...

And you abruptly (by email unlike some others apparently) ask me to triple my bill. I was more than offended by the "loyalty bonus".

Like others I've looked at the competitors and I think I'll cancel my account tonight.

Mozy describes itself thus: "Mozy is the world’s most trusted online backup service for consumers and small businesses with more than one million customers, 60,000 business users and 50 petabytes of information stored at its multiple data centres around the globe. Mozy was the first company to offer a fully featured free online backup service."

Thread poster Settite said: "Mozy never wanted to offer unlimited data, it was simply a marketing ploy to get us in the door. A loss leader strategy they had no intention of maintaining. They can't pretend that they didn't foresee the growth of data storage from 2006 to 2011. Storage has gotten cheaper for the customer, and for Mozy. What I would like from Mozy is a reasonable list of costs that have gone up since 2006 that prove that the 10 per cent [of] power users are really ruining things for the 90 per cent [of] normal users."

MozyHome now stands to lose disgruntled users, hundreds, possibly even thousands of them. Storing bits and bytes is not free. Expecting EMC to do it is unrealistic, even if EMC implied it would do so with MozyHome until this price change came about. It still leaves a bitter taste in users' mouths though. ®

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