I've written about doing data backups to the clouds,  and earlier this month, I suggested that small and medium-sized businesses might want to consider tapping into cloud-based services such as Mozy Online Backup Service for their remote backup needs.

As I mentioned then, I was able to recover an old evaluation license given to me by Mozy that I had forgotten about. I installed MozyEnterprise Demo and have since allowed it to run on my personal productivity laptop for about three weeks now. For readers not familiar with the mechanics of cloud-based backup, MozyEnterprise is the client-side application tasked with detecting and bundling snapshots of modified files into encrypted datasets before actually uploading to Mozy's servers.

So what is my verdict on this remote backup service as a whole? Well, in a nutshell, Mozy just works. Where the MozyEnterprise client is concerned, I would have completely forgotten that it is even there if not for the option to signal the completion of each backup set.

The files that I selected for backup come to about 1.4 GB, and consist mainly of miscellaneous items such as my browser bookmarks as well as various large Outlook PST files. Once configured, Mozy simply works unobtrusively in the background without any user interaction or administrator maintenance. There were no noticeably slowdowns, or lags - I certainly could not tell if it was performing a backup or upload. This is definitely good news for SMBs that are looking for a hassle-free backup tool.

I suppose what is even more amazing is that I did not enable any bandwidth throttling. For administrators who prefer to be more cautious, though, various options are available to limit the amount of bandwidth used by Mozy, or even define the hours where Mozy will not attempt to perform a data backup.

Personally, I feel that the price is affordable for small to mid-sized data storage requirements, though you will want to do your sums for SMBs with users that need to back up multi-gigabytes files all the time.