back to article Violets are violet, roses are... rosy, Dell just got $145.8m for selling Mozy

Dell Technologies has agreed to offload cloud backup subsidiary Mozy to web-based storage outfit Carbonite for $145.8m. Carbonite president and CEO Mohamad Ali said its data protection platform "serves every scenario, from backing up individual laptops to maintaining uptime for hundreds of business servers". "This deal …

  1. Zippy's Sausage Factory
    Unhappy

    This makes me twitchy

    Lots of competitors in the "cloud backup" market getting subsumed by one big player.

    Less competition = higher prices.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This makes me twitchy

      That's very true. I was (am) a long-term code 42 user with a "family plan" that covers up to 5 computers and has unlimited storage. Now that Code 42 is shutting that option down, the costs for back blaze or carbonite are 2-4X more expensive, probably even higher in the long term.

      I think it's time to go more basic and just set up scheduled backup to Amazon S3 myself.

      1. hellwig

        Re: This makes me twitchy

        For corporate, there are few alternatives.

        We were told to move away from CrashPlan, to a "back it up yourself if it's that important to you" option with Box.

        It was quickly realized that this was A) stupid and B) not always legal depending on what we were storing, so back came CrashPlan, even if it's too expensive.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So, both companies decided that unless they had a monopoly online backup isn’t profitable.

    Dell was probably smart to unload Mozy, but for their SMB customers their is still a need.

    They don’t seem to have another product that fills that niche...

    I like Acronis as a more complete solution.

    1. hellwig

      I do have to question how it's profitable for most of these companies. I use BackBlaze for my own computer, and it's like $60/year. It would cost me more money to buy a single HDD of the appropriate size, and BackBlaze has hashing/encryption and redundancy. So maybe what, 80% storage efficiency, and then even just double-redundancy, means I have to remain a customer of theirs for several years just for them to recoup their hardware costs (I don't care how many HDDs they buy, we're still talking several $$ per TB).

      So unfortunately, I see this as a continuing trend. Consolidation, and then price raising.

      1. Calum Morrison

        I uploaded all my eggs to Mozy's basket back when they started - even then it was around 100Gb - because they had such a great deal, something like $5/month or perhaps even less. I figured it wouldn't last and was right - I think EMC started cranking the handle, though in fairness, when the VC cash ends, they need revenue from somewhere.

        I went to home-based external backup HDs for a few years but was never truly happy with the off-site-eyness of that and turned to Backblaze a couple of years ago after all the positive stories on here. They do seem suspiciously cheap but however they're doing it, it seems to be working year after year. Still got that external drive if it all goes wrong again...

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