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Dave Robinson from Mozy sent me an email this morning apologizing for the problems I had restoring my files and promising to address them. What’s more, they’ve also sent DVD copies of all my data via FedEx Overnight, and they’ve given me a complimentary year of service. Wow.

That’s a very classy response. Thank you, Mozy.

Update: Despite Mozy’s attempt to make things right, I still ended up losing some of my data, and judging by the comments my blog posts have received, I’m not alone. Please don’t use Mozy. I now recommend CrashPlan, which I’ve tested extensively and which doesn’t suck.

Last week a hard drive in my home file server died, taking hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s, movies, source code, and other things with it (including the uncompressed master copies of all my cinematic masterpieces). Fortunately, I had backed up the important stuff using Mozy. Unfortunately, Mozy’s restore functionality turns out to suck. Bigtime.

Mozy gives you two options for doing a restore. The preferred option (according to Mozy technical support) is a web restore. You log into Mozy’s website, select the files you want to restore, and then wait about six hours while Mozy’s little file restoring robots pull the files off the storage servers, pack them into self-extracting 7Zip archives, and copy them over to a web server, at which point Mozy sends you an email saying your files are ready to be downloaded.

Before trying that method, though, I tried Mozy’s newer Windows Explorer integration, which displays your backed up files in Explorer as if they’re on an external hard drive and allows you to begin a restore operation by simply selecting the files and directories you want to restore and choosing “Restore” from the context menu. Easy enough, right? Wrong.

Every time I started a restore, Mozy would crunch for a looong time searching for the files on the server, then finally start downloading them. I’d go away and let it run for a few hours, only to return to find that Mozy had hung and was just sitting there doing nothing. Canceling and restarting a restore operation takes a good 15 minutes or so, since the Mozy client doesn’t seem to be very happy about responding to cancel requests.

After about three days of continuously trying and failing to get Mozy to restore my files via this method, I decided to try a web restore at the prompting of Mozy tech support. As described above, my web restore files were created and I was emailed when they were ready to download. In the email was a link to a special Mozy web page that had download links for six archives, each about 4 gigs in size.

I queued up all the links in my download manager as Mozy had suggested and then went and did other things. When I returned several hours later to check on the progress, two of the downloads had finished, but the others had failed.

Unfortunately, Mozy’s restore website thinks it’s smarter than me, so it removes the download link (and deletes the archive) when it thinks you’ve downloaded the file. I was able to restart three of the downloads, but the remaining one had already been deleted and I couldn’t resume the download.

This means I now have to go through my 8,000+ restored files manually and try to figure out which ones were in the archive that Mozy wouldn’t let me download so I can create another web restore request to re-download those files. Thanks Mozy.

I’ve now spent four days trying to coax my backed up files out of Mozy’s broken servers, and I’m fed up. Mozy’s great at making backups painless, but it’s totally broken when it comes to restoring, and that makes it pretty goddamn useless.

I feel cheated now, especially after having written such a glowing review of Mozy earlier.

Update #1: All three remaining downloads have now failed as well. Great.

Update #2: Mozy has apologized for the problems and gone way beyond the call of duty to try to make things right.

Update #3: Despite Mozy’s attempts to make things right, I still didn’t get all of my data back, and I now strongly recommend using CrashPlan instead of Mozy.

No wonder everything George Lucas touches turns to shit these days. He thinks Empire was the worst Star Wars movie.

I'm absolutely in love with Microsoft's Consolas programming font. It's the most beautiful, readable programming font I've ever used, and I've tried tons. Before now, Courier New and (in a pinch) Lucida Console were the only fonts I could stomach for writing code, but Consolas outdoes them both.

Go see Smokin' Aces. Right now. The fact that it has a 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes only proves that film critics are retards who hate fun. That was one of the most entertaining movies I've seen in a good long while.

Sidenote to the two inconsiderate bitches in front of us who kept flipping open their cell phones to text their dealer or whatever: Please get cancer and die in a fire. Thanks.

This morning there was a nasty accident on the highway right next to Kryptiq. I was on my way to the office at the time and got stuck in the ensuing traffic jam. The eastbound lanes of Highway 26 turned into a parking lot for miles, and what's normally a five minute jaunt ended up taking about 40 minutes.

Though the accident scene itself was pretty spectacular (one car was left twisted and mangled on the freeway while another ended up all the way over in Kryptiq's east parking lot, a hundred feet or so from the freeway), what was even more astonishing was the downright retarded behavior of the Hillsboro police officers who were trying to get to the scene.

I was stuck in unmoving traffic about a mile up the road from the accident when I heard the first siren approaching from behind. Like everyone else, I instantly attempted to get my car as far over onto the right shoulder as possible. In Oregon, as in most states in the US, it's actually against the law not to pull over to the right if possible when you hear a siren approaching.

I noticed an odd commotion in my rearview mirror and realized that the two lanes of bumper to bumper traffic that had wedged themselves over to the right were now trying to wedge themselves back over to the left, but the original wedging had left little room to maneuver, so there were cars pointing every which way, some going forward, some going backward. Out of the chaos came a Hillsboro Police Department squad car squeezing through on the right shoulder, blaring its sirens and horn at everyone who had just created a lane for it on the left shoulder.

As soon as everyone had wedged themselves to the left and let the cop through, another siren approached, this one attached to a very big, very angry-sounding firetruck that was trying to get through on the left. Once again, both lanes of traffic went into a chaotic frenzy trying to move back to the right shoulder. Shortly after the fire truck came an ambulance on the left, then two motorcycle cops on the right and one more on the left, just to rub it in.

I sure feel safe knowing the Hillsboro PD has such high hiring standards.

Oh, and for the concerned, the accident apparently only resulted in a broken arm and a few bruises despite the horrifically mangled cars.

Obligatory disclaimer: It should go without saying, but my opinions on the actions of the Hillsboro PD (and on anything else discussed on this blog) are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of Kryptiq or anyone else.

I finally got a response from Carbonite courtesy of their VP of Marketing, Swami Kumaresan. Looks like my email got lost in a spam folder and they didn't realize it until they found the blog post. Oops.

Ryan,

Our PR firm found your blog post about Carbonite and let us know. I then looked and found your email to David in the spam filter, sorry about that. David is traveling and asked me to reply on his behalf for now. But I've cc:ed him and I'm sure he'll respond as soon as he gets a chance. To answer your questions below:

1. Vista will be support later this week.
2. You're right - we're cleaning up the site and the UI.
3. This is also on the To Do list and should be complete in the late spring.
4. You're right about why...but good suggestion. I'll take this up with our product manager.

Again, sorry you didn't get a reply. We do try to reply to everyone, but spam filters and very hectic schedules can get in the way.

Regards,

Swami Kumaresan
VP, Marketing
www.carbonite.com

I didn't expect a response at all, so it's gratifying to hear that Carbonite is listening. It's even more gratifying that they seem to care about my suggestions.

I've got subscriptions for both Mozy and Carbonite now, so I'll keep an eye on them both and see how things shape up.

Update (February 23, 2008): Please ignore this glowing review. Once I actually tried restoring data using Mozy, I learned that it really, really sucks. Don’t use it. I now recommend CrashPlan, which I’ve tested extensively and which doesn’t suck.

Last week I blogged about an email I had sent to the CEO of Carbonite in which I praised the software and made a few suggestions about things that I thought would make it better. I still haven’t heard anything from Carbonite, but I did get an email from Dave Robinson suggesting that I check out Mozy, one of Carbonite’s main competitors (Dave works for Berkeley Data Systems, the makers of Mozy):

Ryan-

I just stumbled across your blog and think it’s time to switch to Mozy! Mozy will offer Vista support next week, our UI is devoid of all that colorful cartoony fluff, we already offer private key encryption and we have all the power user options I think you’re looking for. Heck, we offer unlimited storage for $4.95 per month and I bet if you email out founder (Josh Coates) you’ll probably hear from him before you hear back from Mr. Friend

I actually tried Mozy when it was first announced way back in early 2006 (shortly after the dinosaurs died out). It was much less refined back then, but I remember being intrigued by the idea. I don’t remember exactly why I stopped using it, but it was probably because they didn’t offer unlimited storage then (which they do now). I also seem to remember the client being a little quirky, but I can’t recall how.

Anyway, I had completely forgotten about Mozy until Dave’s email, but it sounded like it had come a long way, so I downloaded the latest version and have been using it on two machines for the past week.

The verdict? Mozy kicks Carbonite’s pansy ass.

Dave wasn’t lying. Mozy has a simple, intuitive UI without any cartoony fluff, it has excellent support for private key encryption so I can be absolutely certain that I’m the only one with access to my data, and it’s got just the right balance of power user options without overwhelming you with confusing choices. One feature I do miss from Carbonite are the handy colored icon overlays on my files to indicate which ones are and aren’t backed up, but that’s a minor inconvenience.

Mozy doesn’t officially support Windows Vista yet (although it will soon if Dave’s not pulling my leg), but the current client runs just fine on my Vista machine and only seems to choke on a few special directories. I did have a weird issue when I installed Mozy on my Windows XP file server; for some reason it kept saying my username and password were invalid. However, an email to customer support resulted in a quick and friendly response containing a link to a pre-release client that solved the problem.

Also, Mozy gets super huge geek bonus points for briefly displaying a random silly status message while doing some processing at the beginning of a backup. So far I’ve seen “Reticulating splines…” and “Validating proof of the Poincaré conjecture…”

In short, Mozy is everything I wanted Carbonite to be and more. I’m sold.

James Horner may be a derivative shell of his once-great self these days, but when he wrote the score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, he was at the top of his game. His movie-scoring career had just gotten started, he had a handful of good or mediocre scores under his belt, and director Nicholas Meyer needed a great adventure score to follow up Jerry Goldsmith's majestic, sweeping epic from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Horner had tried his hand at sci-fi adventure a few years earlier with Battle Beyond the Stars, where he had sketched the rough outlines of many of the themes and styles he would refine and, admittedly, reuse shamelessly for the rest of his career. In listening to that score, it's clear that Horner was deeply inspired by Goldsmith's ST:TMP score and was perhaps even trying to emulate it. As movies go, Battle Beyond the Stars is a real piece of crap with a score that, if a little rough, is still ten times too good for the movie to which it's attached. It's almost as if Horner was experimenting on a movie that he knew would have a very low profile.

The Wrath of Khan presented an enormous challenge, however. This was no low-profile movie, and Horner would have to meet or exceed the high standard set by Goldsmith's Oscar-nominated score for the first film. What's more, Khan was in many ways a more ambitious film, even though it had only a fraction of the budget the first film had.

Horner rose to meet the challenge, kicked it squarely in the face, gave it a good hard noogie, and the resulting score is a masterpiece.

The film opens on an empty starfield, an eerie chord piercing the silence. A lone trumpet blares Alexander Courage's classic eight-note theme from the Original Series, the orchestra swells and leaps headfirst into Horner's powerful main title theme, and the viewer is instantly grabbed by the ears and drawn into the movie, ready for adventure.

Movie music doesn't get much better than this. Don't believe me? Listen for yourself.

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It's tax season again, which means it's time for my yearly visit to the H&R Block website. This year I was greeted by H&R Block's new slogan: "When you got H&R Block, you got people."

What. The fuck.

"When you got H&R Block, you got people." I shit you not, that's their actual slogan, plastered all over their goddamn website. These tardbuckets can't even grammar-check their corporate slogan and they expect me to trust their tax advice? What the hell happened to the world when I wasn't looking?

Take a look at their Canadian website. Their slogan? "Reuniting Canadians with their money." Simple, professional, grammatically correct. How about their Spanish website? My high school Spanish is pretty rusty, but it looks like the slogan is something to the effect of "Harvest that which you sow. That is the commitment of the green square." A little odd, but grammatically correct as far as I can tell.

Apparently what H&R Block is trying to say is that we Americans are a bunch of dumbfucks. Thanks guys. "You got people." Forsooth!