Interestingly enough, it was your post that caused me to check out Mozy and eventually sign up for their unlimited access. I haven't had a need to restore much yet, but I do agree with you that their restore system needs some work. So, now that you are using CrashPlan, are you still using Mozy as a front line of defense, or have you dropped them completely?

No, I'm not using Mozy anymore. Restoring even the smallest files is a pain in the ass with Mozy, so it's not worth it for me. I should have actually tested the restore process before I began using it and recommending it. Needless to say, I won't make that mistake again.

ryan,

thanks for ripping us a new one - we deserve it. august was an ouchy month for us wrt restores. we've invested a lot of engineering effort over the last month in improving the quality of the service.

we've got over 300,000 users and so the laws of large numbers begin to kick in. i'm not talking about the data integrity - i'm talking about the application and usability. a 99% bug free app for 300,000 users means that 3,000 users run into problems where 297,000 report that everything is great. (and of course a handful of those 3,000 have blogs and as such, get to publicly flog us - which is what "helps" remind us and motivates us to improve things for the 1%.. ;-)

bugs aside, i'd say the fundamental problem with online recovery is when folks have a hard drive crash and want to restore say 50GB - this is not something you can just download in a couple of days.

i believe the "right" solution in this case is to have an external drive or USB device shipped out to our customers via FedEx. this is the only practical solution for catastrophic disk failure/recovery.

even DVD's don't scale too well when you get to disk level recovery - they only hold 4.5GB, and so for a good amount of data it's sort of like back in the old days when you had a stack of 3.5" disks to install software. yuck.

the web restore process is good for a file or two - or even good sized data sets - but it's simply not practical to recover 10's of GB via downloading, unless you want to wait a very, very long time.

anyway, that's the latest. the disk/USB restore solution we'll start to beta towards the end of the year.

in the interim it's nice to know that mozy works really well for *almost* everyone, and people love mozy - we were recently voted the #1 Best Website for 2007 by *users* in the Time magazine poll.

so thanks again for the flogging - we really are working on that last one percent!

-josh

Founder, Mozy.com

I appreciate the honest and straightforward response, Josh. In spite of the technical problems, I've been consistently impressed with Mozy's customer service and willingness to own up to mistakes and try to make things right.

That said, I think you may have misunderstood the restore problems being discussed in this post. For the most part, people aren't complaining about long downloads. Obviously, when you're trying to download gigabytes of data, it's going to take a while. I think most people understand that. The problems are with the way Mozy's restore process is implemented. The Windows Explorer integration just plain doesn't work for anything other than small files, and the web restore takes ages (from hours to even days in some cases) to prepare a restore archive before it will even let you begin downloading the archive.

Even after the web restore system has prepared an archive, the download speeds tend to be bad and the connections are unreliable, which means you often have to restart a download many times before being successful. This isn't helped by the fact that the website seems to have some kind of flawed mechanism for detecting when it thinks you've finished downloading an archive, at which point it deletes the archive completely. If you hadn't actually managed to download the entire thing, you're screwed and you have to start the entire restore process over. For large restores that are broken into multiple archives (like mine was), just a single failed download out of several means you have to do the entire restore over, since you have no way of knowing which files were in which archives.

I believe you when you say you're trying to fix these problems, but please don't try to spin this as a minor technical glitch that rarely affects anyone. Mozy's online restore functionality suffers from serious design flaws that are virtually guaranteed to affect any user attempting to restore a large amount of data.

Can you select different data batches for local versus online back-up? I imagine I would want to store very important files online, while less critical data could be mirrored to a local server. This would ensure the survival of crucial data in case of a catastrophic event, such as a fire, without bogging down your day-to-day operations in terms of transfer bandwidth issues.

You can't, but that would be a great feature.

Hi GreyStork,

So far, we've purposely avoided the concept of backup sets in order to keep things simple for our end users. Every once in awhile someone asks us to put it in, so it's on the list.

Our main concern is with the added complexity, one might accidentally neglect some data and in the end, regret it.

Imagine setting up two backup sets, low and high priority, then later moving data to an external drive and forgetting to add that to the high priority set. That's the kind of thing that scares us.

As cheap as disk is these days, it seems more prudent to encourage entire copies with incremental versioning.

All that said, we'll definitely be adding the feature late this year. ;-) I'm thinking we'll hide it a bit in the UI so it doesn't become default behavior for average user.

Best regards,

~Matthew

PS: Wonko, memory footprint drops in next weeks release. :)

Hey, I'm avoiding work at work, and so I thought I'd do a drive-by off-topic commenting. Hi! Neat to see this site is still up and running.

Well dude, count me as a very satisfied Mozy customer after heeding your endorsement back in the Oregon days. Haven't tried any crazy stuff, but I did restore

I'm using S3, which just got better with Panic's release of Transmit 3.6.1, which added S3 support. I can now use S3 very easily with Transmit's bucket and folder management.

I tried to use Mozy a few times, and it never quite worked right, so I gave up. After reading this post, I'm glad I did.

I've been using mozy for about a month now... Fortunately, I realized it was not backing up everything it was supposed to. Tech support has replied within a reasonably amount of time, but their suggestions have been futile. I've deleted and re-installed the software to no avail. Thankfully, I haven't lost anything and needed to restore (I did test it though and after a 10 minute delay the files were indeed available *VERY SMALL RESTORE TESTED*). In the configuration program, it shows everything that I want to back up. It even gives me what seems like correct numbers regarding number of files and megabytes). The problem is, it simply refuses to back up sometimes complete directories. I'm just glad I caught the problems in time.

If you continue to use the software, be absolutely sure it's actually backing up everything you *think* it is backing up.

Seems any concerns about Mozy are more than justified. I have spent over a week simply trying to get Mozy properly setup-without success. I had read positive reviews of their service but they seem to have focused their efforts on marketing and have left customer support in shambles. I sent 4 emails to their support address (their recommended method) without receiving so much as an acknowledgment that they had received my request. So I tried their live chat support. This seemed more promising as the agent seemed to have an interest in helping, but after sending them my log file I didn’t hear anything from them for another 4 days. And after sending them more unanswered emails, I went back to live support today for one last effort at getting this service working. Again they were stumped by the error I was receiving (an ‘Unexpected Error’ at the setup stage of the software install.) While chatting with their support I was able to get CrashPlan installed and up and running. So I asked the Mozy agent to cancel my account and refund my money. To their credit, they did this within seconds-seems they have had some practice with giving refunds.

I had a crash and had been using Intuit online backup for all my data files. It took me about eight to nine hours to figure out why I could not restore the file to my computer. Intuit has crap for online support and I want to jump to another service. Don’t like what I read here about Mozy, maybe give crashplan a try.

After reading a article in Dutch Mac magazine MacFan about online backup tools for OS X, I installed CrashPlan, a few weeks ago. At first, it seemed to work, although a bit slow, in backing up over the internet as well as in reacting on mouse clicks. Also, I had to dig into NAT settings to get it to work.

But later things got worse. Backing up from a Mac Pro to an iMac worked, but the other way around didn’t. Even when nothing changed on the iMac, the number of GB to backup changed randomly from day to day, never reaching a full first backup.

Their helpdesk does return my mails, asking for log files, but when I send them, all they can say is that they don’t have a clue what is going wrong..

So I de- and re-installed CrashPlan, restarted my Macs, tried a new account, tried local backups, etc, etc. I’ve been working with it all day! Frustrating! But nothing helps and now CrashPlan has crashed completely and doesn’t back up anything any more.

Their plan sounds fine but their app is just not working.

What’s been your experience with Restores from CrashPlan Central? Have you done a large restore?

I have successfully done a large [30GB] Mozy restore – many music files – took a long time to build and download the restore files, but it worked OK. Situation occurred because of local hard drive failure.

I’ve done both small and fairly large (~3GB) restores via CrashPlan, and they worked beautifully. With CrashPlan, there’s no “build” delay; you just select the files you want to restore in the CrashPlan interface, click a button, and the files begin downloading.

Download speeds from CrashPlan’s servers are excellent in my experience, and of course, if you’re restoring from another machine on your own network, it’ll be blazing fast.

I’ve exchanged several e-mails with Mozy and them the following basic and simple questions which they won’t answer. I won’t be using Mozy because they won’t assure me my data is protected properly.

Do you backup my data to tape? How often?

Will my data be mirrored to a remote site? How often?

What equipment do you use to store my data?

Do you use RAID 5 or RAID 6? (Raid 6 is important due to high non correctable bit error rates with SATA disks)

Do you de-duplicate my data on disk? (De duplication slightly decreases the safety of the backup. A loss of one block could impact many, many files.

The lack of response to my questions coupled with the comments about restore doesn’t make me comfortable with the Mozy. I won’t be using the service.

I have FIOS (15Mb/s) here at the house but one question I didn’t ask is how MOZY throttles their bandwidth for restores. I’ll bet they wouldn’t answer that one either.

Signed,
Disappointed with Mozy.

I have sent several emails to Mozy. The haven’t bothered to respond to any of them. I did a download of files from Mozy and reformatted my hard drive. Now Mozy no longer recognizes my computer and I can’t add new files to it.
I decided to give Mozy a second chance. But the same thing happened as before. They don’t communicate just as the other reader noted.
It’s bizarre. It’s like there’s nobody home or they just don’t care.

Since all the Mozy posts seem to be negative I thought I would post a success story. This past spring I had a hard drive fail. I has been using Mozy for a few months fortunately. I only kept maybe a 1 GB or so backed up (I use external hard drive for multimedia backup and Mozy for docs and databases and things that change on a regular basis). I do not use Backup Sets. I did not know that Windows Explorer feature was there, so after getting new hard drive in, I went to their web site and requested all my files. A few hours later they emailed a zip I think and I put everything back the way it was the day before it crashed. No problems.

What are you folks backing up that can be so big? Software installations? Things like music and movies are not editable. For music you have MP3 players, external hard drives and DVDs. About the same for movies. What else would you need to back up, that is important enough to back up, but not important enough to get external hard drive. A USB portable one is cheap now. Like $100 for 250GB. Buy an extra and put it in a bank safe deposit box if you are worried about offsite data.

I decided to give MozyHome a try on my main PC and I couldn’t even get it to install. Setup Wizard goes almost through to the end, then starts rolling back. It ends with this: “MozyHome Remote Backup Setup Wizard ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified. To install the program at a later time, run Setup Wizard again.” After reading this three times I laughed out loud! This error gives no clue as to what the problem is, but suggests I might have a different result if I simply try again later. They do not offer phone support for MozyHome so all I could do is send an e-mail. No response yet.

It’s kind of difficult to evaluate a product when you can’t even install it and there is no helpful support info on their website. Anyone know of other free alternatives for under 2GB of data?

I ran into the same thing today with the MozyHome installer. After a little debugging I figured out that it failed because it was trying to create a temp directory on an unformatted partition. You may want to try enabling MSI logging and running the installer. You’ll end up with a logfile in your temp folder that may shed some light on the problem.

1) Enable MSI logging: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223300
2) Run the installer
3) Open up the MSI*.log file in temp using notepad (you can literally type ‘temp’ into explorer to get to the dir)
4) Try to find where the rollback started. E.g., search for ‘Rollback. Rolling back action’
5) Look at the action that failed and see if you can’t figure out why

I noticed this on my system:
MSI (s) (74:B4) [23:38:49:730]: Executing op: CustomActionSchedule(Action=ExecCreateTempDirectories,ActionType=3073,Source=BinaryData,Target=ExecCreateTempDirectories, CustomActionData=D:\Temp|E:\Temp|F:\Temp|/mozy/C:\Windows\TEMP|E:\Temp|F:\Temp|D:\Temp|)

So, I tried to create all the temp folders and realized by F: hadn’t been formatted yet. Formatted it and the install ran as expected.

Best Regards,
Jerret Kinsman

Almost a month and two e-mails later, still no response from Mozy Support.

I greatly appreciate the kind response above from Jerret, who is obviously trying to be helpful (thank you). But if it takes this much effort from a person with technical prowess to figure this out, can you imagine what the average non-technical user would go through in this scenario with no help?

I’m sure that I could get it to work for my own personal use if I spent enough time and resources on it… but I shouldn’t have to. This is supposed to be a finished backup product… something users can depend upon. Instead, it seems more like an experiment that the new owners of Mozy have abandoned.

If I were to recommend Mozy Home to my clients, and if they had the same experience, it would reflect poorly upon me as an IT consultant. I’m not just looking for a backup solution that I can get to work… I’m looking for one that I can confidently recommend to others. At this point, Mozy Home is NOT it.

“I noticed this on my system:
MSI (s) (74:B4) [23:38:49:730]: Executing op: CustomActionSchedule(Action=ExecCreateTempDirectories,ActionType=3073,Source=BinaryData,Target=ExecCreateTempDirectories, CustomActionData=D:\Temp|E:\Temp|F:\Temp|/mozy/C:\Windows\TEMP|E:\Temp|F:\Temp|D:\Temp|)

So, I tried to create all the temp folders and realized by F: hadn’t been formatted yet. Formatted it and the install ran as expected."

Now that is just stupid. I was getting the same error and am glad you posted this. I don’t simply use Microsoft on this PC and have multiple drives and partitions with more than one OS. It probably doesn’t like my unformatted partitions and/or linux partitions.

I submitted a support request so we’ll see what they say and I may just have to try something else out.

Cliff,

I had the same problem with the premature ending error (repeatedly got this error): “MozyHome Remote Backup Setup Wizard ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified. To install the program at a later time, run Setup Wizard again.” I sent an email to Mozy regarding this, and following the advice contained in the response, I added Mozy to Windows’ firewall exceptions. It turns out the firewall was blocking Mozy from whatever it was doing. Add Mozy as an exception or disable the firewall for a few seconds. After these few seconds, turn it back on.

Good luck.

I had the same problem with a prematurely ending installation. Finally, I got into contact with a Mozy support person via their chat support function, and he set me straight.
What I did was to install an earlier version of the app:
www.mozy.com/downloads/mozy-1_8_10_3.exe
Then, I opened regedit (type regedit at the Start menu, klick enter), and went to
HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Mozy\Options
There, I created a new multi-string value named “tempdir”, with the value “C:\Windows\Temp”.
Finally, I installed the latest version of the app from the Mozy website. Now the installation ran smoothly.

Hope this works for you.

i have the same issue with mozy. My system is vista64 and that microsoft help page didnt solve my problem. Can you recommend something for me?

no, sorry, I run 32 bit Vista. however, I’d try their support chat service (available from www.mozy.com), I got through pretty quickly.

Good luck!

Bob,

I realize this response is months later than your question, but I just stumbled across this blog, and thought others might still be curious. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Mozy employee, but would have answered this even if I weren’t. I was a Mozy customer for two years before I began working here. I wasn’t paid or asked to write this, I’m doing it in my spare time.

Do you backup my data to tape? How often?

It would be useless to back up to tape. Hard drives these days are bigger than the tapes that would be backing them up, but anyway, due to our storage system, tape backups are complete unnecessary.

Will my data be mirrored to a remote site? How often?

Not at this time, but there are plans to have that feature as an option in the future.

What equipment do you use to store my data?

Commodity, off-the-shelf, SATA hard drives

Do you use RAID 5 or RAID 6?

Neither. A proprietary implementation of Distributed Reed-Solomon Encoding, actually. We’ve got arguably the best petabyte-scale storage system in the world. The advantages of RAID deteriorate quickly as you start getting into large-scale storage systems. When you’re looking at Mozy’s ~20 PB (yes, that’s twenty thousand terabytes) of storage, the probability of losing data with a RAID system would almost be a given on a daily basis.

To make sure I don’t reveal anything proprietary, I’ll just quote josh coates from an interview he did back in 2006 here: http://media.podtech.net/media/2006/12/PID_001672/Podtech_z_1660-josh-coates-ceo-of-berk.html, "I did a lot of experimentation and research in Reed-Solomon encodings and began to develop algorithms based on those, and architectures that would support a petabyte system…when you’re using a traditional system, say a replicated mirrored system or a RAID 4 or a RAID 5 system, when something fails, you have a window to repair it. Whether that repair is an automated hot rebuild or if it’s some manual process of re-imaging a new system, there’s some repair that takes place.

At the scale we’re at, the mean time to repair that we have to work with, allows us basically to operate a petabyte with one and a half guys manning the ship. If you have a RAID system or a mirrored system, you’ve got between 12 and 24 hours to repair that, before statistically you’re going to have a double fault. If you have a double fault, you’re going to lose permanent data at the petabyte scale. We haven’t made disks fail less, but we’ve made it so we don’t have to run around, scurry around and try to repair these disks within the window of time, we’ve got a month."

Do you de-duplicate my data on disk?

Yes, but due to our encoding, it’s not a liability like you think.

I have FIOS (15Mb/s) here at the house but one question I didn’t ask is how MOZY throttles their bandwidth for restores. I’ll bet they wouldn’t answer that one either.

Sorry to disappoint. There’s no limit on download/restore speeds. At home, I’ve got a service similar to FIOS (FTTP), and have seen continuous downloads of multiple GB restores (30+ GB) over 8 Mbps (peaks over 12 Mbps). There have been significant strides made in the restore process over the past year.

Until I read Jerret’s response. I realized I have an external drive that is encrypted w/Truecrypt. When I mount the drive, it still shows up as I:, but it creates another volume known as Q:. Q: is the “drive” TrueCrypt creates so that I can interact w/the drive. It’s the unencrypted drive, while the data is encrypted on I:. When Q: exists, I can not access I: through explorer. I realized it was trying to install this temp folder, but could not b/c if I can’t access the drive, neither can it. I dismounted the truecrypt volume, then removed the external drive using the remove device tool. Once I did that, it installed w/no problems.

I checked the registry, and found string they had Johan create was already created by the install. I will now be rebooting and seeing how everything works. Wish me luck!

I Wanted to use mozy, but I did not want to start doing the things you have typed here. I want to use my life for something else. Mozy have to improve the client.

I used https://www.idrive.com/index.html – I installed it without any problem and now I can spend some hours on something else while you debug the mozy client.

I have a Ubuntu partition that seems to be causing it to end prematurely. I just hid the drive in the IFS drives utility and the install worked just fine.

I had the exact same problem installing onto Windows Server 2008. The tempdir multi-string key mentioned above solved it, however, for MozyPro the key has to be “MozyPro”. This was the solution that finally worked for me after many failed attempts.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\MozyPro\Options
Create a new multi-string value named “tempdir”, with the value “C:\Windows\Temp”

I’ve used Mozy for a couple year, both professional version and home. On both a PC and a Mac. I recently had an unscheduled harddrive replacement and Mozy really saved my butt. Also, after many minor accidental deletes, it’s been a savior. I don’t mean to belittle others’ issues, but for me it’s been awesome.

The Mozy backup process if fairly straightforward and easy, assuming of course you are able to install the software.  The restore process is difficult for large jobs so be sharp and learn from my mistakes.

Overall Issues with Mozy

1. Customer service leaves something to be desired. 

   1. a. Be prepared to wait several days for email responses. 

   2. b. The live chat help desk has good intentions but could use more training. 

   3. c. There is no obvious phone number to call for support. 

   4. d. Mozy does not allow you to restore only missing files.  If you wish to restore a folder Mozy will ask to either rename or overwrite your existing files requiring you to download what you already may have. 

Issues you may encounter while restoring with the Mozy Windows Client.

1. A file may be skipped and the Mozy client will not notify you. It will show a “Restore Success” message. 

   1. a. The Solution: Open the History tab of the Windows Client and select the restore in question.  The bottom half of the windows will show which files transferred.  If you sort by Transferred Time any rows that are blank did not transfer. 

   2. b. Alternate Solution: Examine the Mozy.log located in the C:\program files\MozyHome\Data . If you carefully review the file it will note which files were skipped. 

2. The Mozy Windows Client can not be stopped and restarted. If you start a large restore be sure you can finish it as the client lacks any options to resume it later. 

3. The Mozy Windows Client will not display the properties of a file/folder such as the file size nor the number of files within a folder.  This is necessary to compare the number of files downloaded to the number of files on the server ensuring you received all your files. 

   1. a. The Solution: This information can be gleaned from the online Web Restore explorer.  By selecting a folder its information will be shown at the bottom of the restore window. 

Issues you may encounter while restoring with the Web Restore.

1. Restores have to “build” and are not available for immediate download through Web Restore.  Large restore jobs take a while to build.  I needed to restore 80gb of data and had to wait several days for the restore to build. 

2. Large restore jobs are split into multiple self-extracting compressed EXE files which alone is not a bad thing.  But Mozy expires a download link as soon as it thinks your finished downloading it.  The problem is this can happen prematurely leaving you with 100mb of 3.6gb file and no way to complete you restore.  Since hundreds of files may be in the EXE file it is rather difficult to compare what you have downloaded to what is missing. 

3. Restores expire after 7 days which may be insufficient time for a large restore. 

Hints

1. Do not restore from the Windows Client it is more trouble than it is worth, albeit it can be faster for small (less than 1gb, few files) restores.  Instead use the web restore for these reasons: it can be stopped and restarted, it display the number of files, most likely will not skip files. 

2. When downloading from the WebRestore be sure to use a download manager such as FlashGet, FDM, or Getright as the Mozy servers do support stopping resuming the download. 

UPDATE:

I can now confirm that the Web Restore can skip files. The Web Restore skipped 10 of my files and did not provide any error message or email to notify me.

Also. The Web Restore dialog will show the number of files in a given folder but will not display the number of folders in a given folder. To determine the number of folders in a given folder use the Mozy Windows Client and it will be displayed in the status bar.

I found this blog on the web while looking for dual boot solutions and wanted to point out a few things since I have done some research on local home backup solutions.

unanswered questions

Bob,

I realize this response is months later than your question, but I just stumbled across this blog, and thought others might still be curious. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Mozy employee, but would have answered this even if I weren’t. I was a Mozy customer for two years before I began working here. I wasn’t paid or asked to write this, I’m doing it in my spare time.

Do you backup my data to tape? How often?
It would be useless to back up to tape. Hard drives these days are bigger than the tapes that would be backing them up, but anyway, due to our storage system, tape backups are complete unnecessary.

I will point out that if you are a person that is doing serious archiving and you want perfect copies of the files you are storing, digital tape backups are the best when it comes to long term storage for the following reasons.
1. Tapes have a longer life expectancy and durability then most media types. Most CDR’s/DVD’r have a 10 year life span.

2. Files cannot be accidentally deleted from tape, you have to format the whole thing and overwrite it for any kind of destruction to happen to data. With external hard drives, you never know when or why your data could be corrupted. Just plugging/unplugging the device can cause file corruption.

3. Tapes have more storage durability and have less moving parts. If you drop a hard drive from 5 feet off the ground you could lose the data on that drive, digital tapes dont have the problem for the most part.

Serious music lovers that want to keep their digital music intact will use digital tapes for archiving.

Secondly, I wanted to point out that off-site backups should be secondary to any local backup system you have. Data Redundancy is the key to preventing restore problems. have at least 2 of not three different places/media/ where you store you backups. And use differnt backup software as well.

Mozy sounded like a cure all to my back up needs, but….

After needing some tech support and 3 live chats later I’ve been waiting for over 2 weeks and not had a single email back from them. does anyone know how to get through to these people? I need help and a company that just took over $100 bucks of mine for a service has left me high and dry…

I have been using Mozy for over a year now and agree with what most people have said. The cost of paying for the CrashPlan software will keep me there though.

CrashPlan is now free for personal use. You don’t need to pay anything unless you want to back up to CrashPlan Central, which runs about $5 a month.

Hi Zane,

In every possible way, we’re less expensive than Mozy. Whether it’s 1 computer for 1 year (barely save anything) or 3 computers for 1 year (you can save $287.79) Check out the online pricing comparison:

Online Backup Savings Calculator

A recent article in MacWorld ran us against 6 other competitors including Mozy and Carbonite – we won overall recommendation and in several categories:

Macworld online backup services review

So best solution, least expensive – hard to beat. Remember – you don’t have to purchase CrashPlan+ if it’s for personal use.

I’ve had a terrible time with Mozy twice this year when their software abruptly stopped working and I had to go through major shenanigans to get it working again – at least the first time, when I did actually get it working again, currently it’s actually choked on trying to stop after not backing up a single byte of data over the last several hours. The tech support (email only, no phone support at all) have handed me off to a new staffmember every 1-2 days for the last week and a half and have topped it off, after extensive emails about an Intel laptop, my primary workhorse, the last tech support drone had the nerve (or simple cluelessness) to tell me “oh, you should update, my records show me that your G5 is on old software, so upgrade and it will be better.” As if she hadn’t even read the extensive emails about the computer I really needed backed up – my Intel laptop. I have wasted so much of my time attempting to communicate with them and follow their instructions and their software just chokes. This all actually started when a Mozy update actually disabled all printing on my laptop, which let me tell you is not fun to discover when you’re in a clients office and you can’t make a printout. Realizing (days after the fact) that it was my laptop’s BACKUP software that bollixed my system-level print capabilities was infuriating, but the treatment I’ve received from support since then has been nothing short of disgraceful. No one gives me a straight answer, everyone just tells me “oh, upgrade to the recent version” and ignores the fact that it still chokes all the time and routinely just stops working altogether. Inattentive, unskilled, and patronizing tech support by email, combined with a crappy, unreliable product is not something I care to pay money for, thank you very much.

I am a professional photographer and I’ve “used” Mozy for about 4 Months thinking that it would be good insurance. Granted, I am trying to back up approx 800GB and realize that could take a while (6 months), but I am beginning to believe that it will never happen and based upon reading these posts I’m thinking I’ll have a worse experience recovering. The program “stalls out” about 3 times a week and unless you double check it periodically, you’ll never know. I’ve sent a couple of emails to them and they have responded very quickly with useless information. In the end, I’m beginning to realize that I have made a $50 donation to the company – oh well – live and learn as they say.
I am still interested in finding an online back up company, so if there are recommendations for such a company that can handle LARGE backups – please let me know.

Thanks,

Keith
www.MagicalMoments.us

I don’t understand. You have your in-house backups, you can backup with a friend off site. Why would you ever need large backups with Mozy etc.?

For convenient, daily backups off site – just use the gigs available from gmail or any modern email service.

If you still thought you needed to pay a slow service like Mozy etc., it would probably only be for a few files, temporarily in very rare circumstances? even if you religiously used it.

What are the chances that both your houses were destroyed? And even so, why not just enlist two more friends, or however many so you can sleep at night? And avoid the monthly cost.. to save up for triple backups

Update: Mozy refunded my money, which was nice of them since they technically didn’t have to.

Here’s the problem. What I really want is a online backup/archive service with emphasis on archive. In other words, if I delete a file on my computer, it doesn’t delete off of the server unless I approve it.
I thought crash plan would work, but based upon all of the info out there, I have my doubts. If anyone can confirm crash plans functionality on this matter, it would be greatly appreciated. I looked into Jungle drive, but at 1+ TB, they are way too expensive. Then my hopes were raise when I recently found Elephantdrive.com – they offer what I am looking for at the price I am looking for. Oh, but it couldn’t be that easy – and it’s not! There is a “little” problem – they limit their monthly up load to 100G per month :( with no seeding option.
I have spent HOURS and HOURS researching everything I can find and I give up. I don’t believe there to be a solution out there for less than $75 a year. So I will continue to buy 1TB hard drives at $100 a piece and perform weekly backups and hope my house doesn’t catch fire.
BTW – using a friends computer is a great idea if you have a friend and if that friend has a computer and if that friend with a computer doesn’t mind giving up their drive space, bandwidth and sense of computer security. I am not that fortunate to have such a friend :)

It was just after I wrote my last post when I decided to make “one last search” and low and behold I found myself at crashplan’s website technical support for instruction on their desktop controls. And there it was right in front of me – a check box for never under when to delete files. Do you think they mean never when they say never? Wow! I’m in and waiting for instructions on how to seed my back up. Yea – for now?

Keith,

While the clever person could “delete” files trusting their backup to keep them forever, it’s a bit of a bad idea. You see, a backup is supposed to be a “copy” of something. Don’t trust any provider to keep your one and only one copy of something.

If we were to offer an archival copy service, we’d store at least 3 copies of your data in two locations on this side. We do NOT do that with backup data. Make sense?

Never trust a backup provider to provide archive service.

That said, if you have a copy at your house .. go nuts. :)

It doesn’t work. I installed it a few weeks ago, it started running the initial backup, I shut down my computer, and it has never backed up anything since. I try to run it manually and the program simply doesn’t start up. What’s also annoying is it sends me an email every few days to remind me that it’s not working. Also, if you don’t get Crashplan+, your data only gets 128 bit encryption as opposed to 448 bit encryption that other major services seem to offer on every plan they have. There’s a reason why it’s cheaper than the other services – you get what you pay for.

OK. So, all these problems, add this to it…

I have now had mozy for a few months and have been frustrated by it. Vista ultimate 32 n 64 bit versions, Win 7 ultimate 32 bit n 64 bit versions (just upgraded). I am ANALYZING the back up set after it SAYS it completed, and I am missing files. I go folder by folder to spot check, missing file after file….

I must say that CS is attentive at first, then the damn ticket changes hands 3 times over a 5 day period, they then advise something different each time, they never read the prior correspondence and they send me a link to the manual for MACS? Are they getting up to speed with the problem when they take over the issue.

At work (Technology Institute) we bill for even comming over to look at a computer, yet Mozy seems to be ok for US to do the dirty work on OUR time (when we pay) to fix these bugs. THIS IS YOUR PRODUCT I PAY FOR, THIS IS YOUR PROGRAMMING, YOU FIX IT!!!
What would Mozy do if I sent them a service bill for reg edits, .dat file edits, and .info file edits. This is your problem and you have US fix it?!?

These are advance fixes they are suggesting, they require experience and expertise. Am I getting compensated for it? No, they r billing me for it!!

I am going to carbonite or myotherdrive…I will try both, back ups and restores….

I am running an external drive backup first, then i back it up online….trials and tribulations at my expense…

I had Mozy Home installed on my home computer for 9 months. You are all correct in that is does not back up files you have deleted – minor problem. After about 5 months of using Mozy Home – about the time it was bought by an overseas customer – I began having trouble with my backups. Client Error this and Client Error that. It was not backing up my password protected files, although it says it does. It would start and complete and backup, only to start another one 1 minute later. Backups were fairly quick, but then I noticed that every time, right after a backup, in my even viewed it showed up to 8 bad blocks that never appeared before and only appeared after the backup. Had to run a complete chkdsk/f/r and you know that takes forever. Started writing emails to customer support that were answered promptly but not in any manner that I could read. Run-on sentences, misspellings, and completely unintelligible solutions. Of course, they don’t speak English as their first language – probably not even their second language! After many attempts to correct serious problems, I uninstalled and am waiting for my refund – LOL! This company used to be based in Utah and owned by an American company. In that respect, you can always ask for customer service agents that have English as their first language. Once you leave the country, as they did about 5 to 6 months ago – maybe more now – you are not given that option. In 2009, it fell from @2 on the online backup service to #12, per PC Magazine and C-Net. Don’t bother. There are more reliable online backups out there, you just have to do the research. I want one that will restore all my data without my having to unzip files and figure out where each item was originally installed, so am looking into Imaging software with an external drive. I honestly don’t know the solution to keeping your data safe from crashes, etc., which I have had in the past and had to rebuild my whole computer from scratch, which took at least 2 months – and I am pretty computer literate, but no IT. Sorry, Mozy does suck and can be dangerous. Watch your step.

Really, it’s all in my title. I’m no encoding genius, nor have I tried every online backup service, but I can only try to read every review and weigh out the advantages and disadvantages.

In the end, There is no rhyme or reason that you yourself (the owner of your own critical backup) shouldn’t have some sort of External Raid array in your home with scheduled batch file backups at your command/convenience.

As a combination of people have mentioned in these replies:
I also believe that off-site backup should be your LAST resort to restoring files
I also believe that a burned down house is highly-unlikely, BUT shouldn’t be overlooked
I also understand the benefits of tape drives, but really, media with moving parts are cheap, and easily replaceable every 3 years (I wouldn’t wait the full 10)

As long as you stick by those guidelines, the only thing you should have to worry about is a fire.
At that point, as someone mentioned; bring an external media backup copy of your on-site backup to a different location (somewhere to work with you at least once a week) or at some save deposit box, etc…

I also understand the views of someones reply about not being compensated for doing our own technical support on our own computers for issues that the backup service is having on their own. Which is only more reason to do it yourself. Peace of mind, is priceless.

Just for an example… (any old-schooler DOS users will know what I’m posting down here) I’m going to include my ‘Monday’ back-up batch file to one of my external hard NAS drives that is a Raid5 that also gets backed up to a single external USB drive that gets carried to a different location.

@echo off
if exist v:\ subst v: /d
subst v: k:\BACKUPS\Mon\Y
if exist y:\trashbox rd y:\trashbox /s /q
xcopy y: v: /c/h/e/v/y/s/d
echo Now changing file attributes of backup files. Please wait…
attrib -s -h k:\BACKUPS\Mon\y\. /s /d
subst v: /d
echo End of Y: Drive (Music) Monday Backup

subst v: k:\BACKUPS\Mon\x
if exist x:\trashbox rd x:\trashbox /s /q
xcopy x: v: /c/h/e/v/y/s/d
echo Now changing file attributes of backup files. Please wait…
attrib -s -h k:\BACKUPS\Mon\x\. /s /d
subst v: /d
echo End of X: Drive (Graphics) Monday Backup

subst v: k:\BACKUPS\Mon\W
if exist w:\trashbox rd w:\trashbox /s /q
xcopy w: v: /c/h/e/v/y/s/d
echo Now changing file attributes of backup files. Please wait…
attrib -s -h k:\BACKUPS\Mon\w\. /s /d
subst v: /d
echo End of W: Drive (Media) Monday Backup
echo End of batch file
pause
____________________________________________

I keep everything on separate physical drives.

Most of DOS commands can be google’d to be further understood. It’s very simple stuff, and effective.

Unfortunately, your computer has to be turned on for these .bat files to run at your ‘scheduled tasks’ schedule time that you input. However, same goes for Mozy, or any other offsite backup.

I don’t know if any of the above will help anyone, but what it seems to me is that the lazy people are having the issues, and the technically inclined are ready for them and avoid them.

We all make mistakes. Some learn from them, others wait for them, and the rest foresee them.

Survival of the fittest.

Here it is in a nutshell
Used the free service and believed that back up was taking place.
Signed up for Unlimited version and asked Mozy how to convert
Mozy response, “we do not have an account on record of a free account and no back up was taking place
My “history”, on my machine, showed back-up taking place on a regular basis
Signed on for Paid Unlimited version and began to monitor performance
History showed connections to Mozy as scheduled but no bytes transferred
Contact Mozy –
we cannot find your account, Oh yes here it is, it is working
History indicated connection etc but again no bytes transferred
Contact Mozy – the worst response you could imagine, most of the people
Writing me messages could not speak English and clearly did not understand
What I was talking about.
No doubt this is the worst customer service you can imagine and I caution all users – YOU BETTER CHECK TO SEE IF BACK-UP IS REALLY HAPPENING
I am going to my own external hard drive for back-up – at least I will be able to “find it”
Summary – Extremely bad service, no refund of money spent, no back-up, clearly in this case absolute FRAUD

I have used Mozy to back up 3 GB of files for the past two years. It seemed to work well, but I ran into trouble before Christmas when it wouldn’t backup any longer. I must say they were very good about trying to fix the problem. Emails were answered even though it was a different person each time. I was finally handed over to an ‘accelerated’ technician, who then proceeded to get on the phone with me for 4 hours one evening and 2 hours the next morning! (from India, of course.)He eventually took over my machine (don’t do this) and changed many things. Mozy still didn’t work until I happened to look at some Help pages in which it said that you shouldn’t have another backup program running. I had BackUpMaker copying to a DVD each evening. I disabled that and Mozy began to work again. Now why didn’t they think of that? It was never mentioned. My computer was not the same after that,however, and at the beginning of January, my Hard Drive wouldn’t start and was finally replaced. (??) After replacing all my programs, I asked for a Download of my 3 GB of files. That worked all right, except the document files will not go into MS Word, and all my Outlook Express files were not there at all, except for something called ‘Search Folder’, which had the extension .dbx which wouldn’t open, no matter what I tried. Now the emails I receive from Mozy are absolutely useless. Can anyone tell me how to open the file? And is it even Outlook Express? i have many emails in there that are important as well as an extensive Contact list. And also how to get my documents into Word? I have many of them. Thanks..

A waste of time and money. A waste of time because I have tried to get my files recovered. I had a computer crash, amd wanted to retrieve my files to my new computer. Hahahahahaha Lesson learned. Mozy no good.