Mozy

» see mozy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

cloud backup was an american category at the residential layer. mozy was the brand most likely to be running in the system tray of a us small-business owner's windows xp machine from around 2007 onward, scheduled to upload overnight. josh coates started berkeley data systems in 2005 in american fork, utah and ran it under the mozy name. emc bought the whole thing in october 2007 for 76 million dollars.

emc was the enterprise storage giant of the era and the mozy purchase was supposed to bolt a consumer brand onto a corporate file-storage business. honestly, it never really clicked. emc spun off into dell technologies in 2016. dell offloaded mozy to carbonite on 19 march 2018 for 148.5 million dollars. carbonite ran the brand for a year, then stopped accepting new mozy customers, then suspended every remaining mozy account on 8 january 2020. backups that had not been migrated to carbonite were deleted shortly after that.

i did not run mozy (more or less). cloud backup as a paid consumer category never really had a foothold in turkey at the time. the alternative for me through the 2000s was an external hard disk on the desk plus a cd-r every few months. mozy belonged to the english-speaking small-business windows desktop, which is where the cloud-backup pitch made financial sense in the broadband era before fiber.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

mozy installed a small windows or mac agent that watched chosen folders and uploaded encrypted blocks to a data center overnight. the consumer plan started as a flat monthly fee for unlimited storage, then capped after the emc acquisition. the mac client always lagged the windows one in feature parity, and the restore flow was slow on real-world residential upload links. backblaze undercut mozy on price by 2010 and never gave it back.

~ the corporate hallway ~

mozy lived through three owners. berkeley data systems built it from 2005. emc bought it in 2007 for a consumer beachhead inside an enterprise storage business, and used the install base to test cloud-storage infrastructure ideas. dell inherited mozy through the 2016 emc deal and quietly looked for a buyer. carbonite picked it up in 2018 and ran it down deliberately, moving paying customers to the carbonite brand instead of operating two backup services in parallel. the brand died not from a market change but from a parent company deciding it was easier to consolidate than to keep selling.

~ the day it died ~

carbonite gave mozy customers a long migration window through 2019 and a hard cutoff on 8 january 2020. on the cutoff date the mozy service stopped accepting connections and the backup blobs began aging out. customers who had not moved their data to carbonite lost their backups outright (this part was harsh, by the standards of cloud-backup sunsetting). the support page redirected to a carbonite migration faq for a while after that, then to nothing.

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