[darrenkopp]

I had about 50GB of backed up data with mozy for that last 3 years, growing from ~20GB when i started. I've been paying $5 per month for almost 3 years now, which means I have paid ~50 a year (very rough to take out transaction fees and bandwidth fees, etc). That should buy them at least 320GB of average sata disk drives per year (assuming all money going into storage).

This means for "unlimited" they can recoup 6x the storage i was using per year through my fees. So the question becomes why it's not sustainable? Too large a company and not sustainable due to employee salaries? Not economical enough storage prices (ie using enterprise SAS disks rather than cheap SATA)? I'm guessing since they buy large quantities of disks, they could get drives for even cheaper than what you get on NewEgg.

This is why I believe that this model _is_ sustainable, assuming that it's done right. Also why I switched from Mozy to Backblaze because I felt that Mozy was gouging me by taking away their unlimited plan and replacing it with a tiered plan.

[latch]

Just playing devil's advocate, since I largely agree with you. I do think you are missing 3 key costs: redundancy, power (including cooling) and people.

I actually don't think bandwidth is in the same ballpark as these three items.

[wvenable]

I'd stick with mozy, but 50GB is too small. I have about 89GB in Mozy right now and if I could get that for the $5 per month, I wouldn't go anywhere. Mozy is pretty slow, so backing up even more data isn't very practical. Also, their system doesn't handle large files very well. My 89GB is just pictures, personal movies, documents, and source code.

[roel_v]

Have you ever tried a restore from Mozy? I backed away from them when I did. Apparently, there is no 'resume' functionality when restoring. That means putting down a laptop to restore 50 gb, have a connection failure or needing to move the computer from office to home after 30 gb, and then needing to restart from scratch. That make me go %( - and I still haven't been able to cancel my Mozy account, after 2 months, because despite what the documentation says there is no 'unsubscribe' link in your profile and the customer support seems to be an email black hole.

Just venting I guess, but beware if you are trusting your data to Mozy...

[narad]

I have less pictures and data. I am using Google Storage. It costs very less ( $5 per 20GB per Year).

[absconditus]

It is a good thing that hard drives connect to the Internet by themselves and do not require rack space, servers, power or bandwidth.