Carbonite vs. Mozy

Carbonite and Mozy are two of the most trusted brands in cloud backup. Both services were founded in 2005 and offered very similar services until Mozy dropped their unlimited storage plan in 2011. While Carbonite still states they offer unlimited storage they have been more forth coming in stating that they have a bandwidth cap on accounts that store more than 200GB. This effectively makes them not unlimited as well, since it would take a lot longer for people to upload data past the 200GB to Carbonite. Carbonite has since changed this policy and removed the bandwidth data throttle. You can read more about that on this post.

Carbonite and Mozy since 2011 have also had a more aggressive mobile and cloud storage strategy. Carbonite with the release of a strong featured mobile app and the release of Currents has offered users the ability to backup their mobile devices and sync data between devices.

Mozy has released Stash to offer file sync and cloud storage between devices with the storage being shared with the main Mozy account. The Mozy mobile app, while not as full featured as the Carboniteapp, does backup a mobile users photos and videos automatically and allow for easy access to all of the users backed up files and files in their Stash folder.

Here is a comparison table between features of Carbonite and Mozy. The services are still fairly neck and neck after all these years in features.

Carbonite appears to be ahead of Mozy price and storage wise when you look at the table above. If you look at the cost of Carbonite vs. Mozy when you compare some of the extra features that Mozy offers without extra cost Mozy comes out being a better value.

Carbonite Home vs. Mozy cost comparison.

Mozy offers the ability to backup external hard drives and manage a local backup without any additional cost. To get those extra features from Carbonite you need to purchase the HomePlus subscription which is only available for Windows.
Carbonite HomePlus vs. Mozy cost comparison.

Mozy also backs up video by default and offers the ability to restore your files and have them shipped to you by courier. Carbonite offers this only in the HomePremier version. This is the version of Carbonite that does finally offer all of the features that Mozy offers by default.

Carbonite HomePremier vs. Mozy cost comparison.

When you finally look at the cost per computer of Carbonite vs. Mozy to get all of the features that Mozy offers in their you need to purchase the Carbonite HomePremier subscription that costs per computer significantly more than Mozy. Now to be fair those comparisons were using the cost of the Mozy 125GB plan that allows you to backup up to three computers on one account. If you only need to backup one computer it is still most economical to purchase the Mozy 125GB plan instead of the 50GB one computer plan.

Carbonite HomePremier vs. Mozy 125GB plan for one computer cost comparison.

If you only need to backup one computer Carbonite clearly comes out ahead.

The Winner
If you are deciding between Carbonite and Mozy which service you should choose depends a great deal on how many computers you have to backup. If you only need to backup one Windows machine Carbonite is the winner. If you need to backup two computers Mozy comes out ahead since their 125GB plan plus extra storage to 205GB per computer is less expensive. If you need to backup more than 200GB then Carbonite is probably your best choice.

Update: Rewrote parts of the post to reflect the change in Carbonite’s bandwidth throttling policy change.