I'm pretty sure I once saw "Reticulating splines" on the Sims splash-screen.

It's a SimCity 2000 reference. Maxis uses it a lot.

This is exactly what I've been looking for and you can't beat free!!!!

This is a fantastic service! My only worry is how long the company will last. Will the company exist in 2 years time when my hard drive crashes and I lose all my files..

If a google or yahoo offered a similar service, which I believe google will soonish, they'd get my business in a flash.

You will find that Mozy cannot update any encrypted files on your system.

Most, dare I say, "power users" would have their files encrypted as would anyone having sensitive client business data.

It seems crazy that their backup client cannot read encrypted files stored on the local hard drive.

Windows Vista offers "BitLocker" whole-of-drive encryption!

I don't use Windows file encryption, but I suspect this may be because Mozy simply can't access the encrypted files because Windows won't let it. Believe it or not, this is a feature, not a bug.

Unless I'm mistaken, Mozy backups are carried out by a service that runs under the "Mozy Backup Service" user account, which is a member of the "Backup Operators" group. Unless this user or group has read access to your encrypted files, it won't be able to access them. That's just Windows doing its job and keeping your files safe.

Have you tried emailing Mozy support about this issue to see what their official answer is? I wouldn't be surprised if they told you the same thing.

Within an hour of reading this, I was punching in my credit card number at Mozy's site.

Yes, of course.

This is the irrelevant response I received (despite my initial inquiry being quite detailed):

"There may be a solution for you. You need to download the Mozy Decrypt application and use it to decrypt your files.

You can get it by logging into www.mozy.com/login and going to 'Download Mozy.' It'll be listed under the Mozy client."

Have you tried giving the "Mozy Backup Service" user access to your encrypted files?

Mozy has been down a week as of 2/10/07 and has not backed my or my mom's data

It's been working just fine for me. Sounds like the problem is on your end. Have you tried contacting Mozy support?

I can also confirm that is has been working for me during this period. Mozy is an excellent service.

Doesn't show or backup up critical settings in the Documents and Settings\Local Settings\Application Data folder. Just so you know! I back these up to flash drive - they're small but very valuable files. Have email tech support twice - no answer. Love the program, though. 50 Gs backed up and counting!

What files are you referring to?
You can force Mozy to back up almost ANY file on your system. You need to change some settings to have it show you those files in the UI, but it can be done.

Are you talking about EFS encrypted files? I have sucessfully used Mozy to back up AxCrypt encrypted files, encrypted ZIP files and TrueCrypt encrypted files.

Mozy still cannot backup Encrypting File System (EFS) files. This "feature" has been "coming soon" for some time now. Other online backup systems have no trouble backing up EFS files.

I have been using Mozy since Feburary and love it. My backup is almost done (up to 100GB now) and have had no problems with it so far. You can see my personal review below.
http://titanmiller.no-ip.org/publog/?p=26

I tried using Mozy for several weeks on my Dell PC at home, but it would frequently give me a Blue Screen Of Death on XP. Email threads with Mozy were slow, slow, slow, and I eventually gave up since they didn't seem to be able to figure it out. I'm using Carbonite now. But Carbonite doesn't offer self-managed encryption keys...! Dammit! (Yet? They claim it's coming.) Mozy sounds really good but I've had bad luck; and when I tried to sign up for MozyPro for my new laptop at work their website gave me error messages when I tried to place my order. (sigh) Excellent sounding product needing MUCH TLC before it's fully baked.

I bought Mozy a month ago, and it really slows down your PC while it is doing backups, even if you toggle all the right switches to tell it only to backup in the background.

It also does a lot of work (that can be seen in Task Manager details) when it is supposed to be suspended, and it has a noticeable affect on performance.

I had it back up 40 Gb, which took over a month, and it was a slow, painful month. I won't even bother doing my whole drive.

Recommendation - use the free service for 2Gb. Don't pay for more than that, and just back up your most essential data.

I've used Mozy now for close to 2 years and have been impressed with improvements over time.

Patrick, I find the backups to be relatively quick, initially taking 5-6 days to back up around 20 GB... I believe time is more of an issue with the upload speed of your internet provider (I use road runner with upload speed of around 350-370 Kb/s.) Subsequent incremental backups are scheduled at my convenience (typically at night) and so I don't notice any system bogs.

One thing I do have is the old prepaid plan for 30 GB backup which allows me to backup my desktop and laptop on one account for around $50/year. The new plan is $5/month for unlimited backups, but it seems you have to have separate accounts for each computer.

I have only had occasion to use Mozy restore a couple of times when I was on vacation and needed to access files on my desktop... worked like a charm. (Not supposed to be uses for file sharing purposes, but if you don't abuse it and don't give out your password to others who may access your files I think it is OK.)

B.

I tried Mozy and i found the back of my whole system a little slow and not dynamic. The system back up with Memopal(www.memopal.com) is faster and easier to use, and allowos you to priorize the files back up. For now it is in beta version but it gives you 250GB of free space for three months.

You could try out concenstus.com as well. It uses the Mozy pro servers but it is monitored so you will get a call from a tech if it doesn’t back up and also connect to you computer for you or walk you through over the phone to help install it and any questions you have you can call and they have answers. Its mozy with more support.

Mozy does not work well with Vista EFS. I backed up my files without a problem but when I needed to restore them, I received the files but I couldn’t open them. Support gave up and said to file a police report. Go figure…how’s that going to help me?

It looks like Mozy is owned by EMC, so I’m confident their going to be around. EMC THE Enterprise Storage provider.

Well… I suppose all of these are fine if you don’t actually have much data, but I’ve calculated that it will actually take me about a year to back up my stuff to Mozy. A year. And by that time, I’ll have more stuff. Heaven forbid I need to restore it and I don’t have a whole year to waste doing it.

I had problems with EFS (encrypted file system) on Mozy using Vista 32bit. It appears as though the unzip utility from the web download doesn’t set the file attributes back to encrypted when the file content really is encrypted. However, I tried Carbonite and Anglebackup and wasn’t impressed with their performance either. Carbonite wouldn’t backup all my files, even though I selected them. It might be because I selected one folder while the other folder was loading. But, I don’t ever want to have a situation where files are lost in a backup. Anglebackup is difficult to read on my Vista 32bit machine. It appears as though the back round color is transparent. So, I went back to Mozy after I decrypted all my EFS files and it works fine. Maybe I will use EFS next year when Mozy works the bugs out.

It appears to me that it is easy to loose files on all three of these internet backup providers if I didn’t verify that the files are recoverable first. They all have their own weaknesses. Mosy doesn’t restore EFS files, Carbonite doesn’t recursively find all my files, and Anglebackup doesn’t have a web utility to verify restore on an independent machine (Plus the graphics have a problem on Vista).

Any good back up plan should use multiple locations and multiple types of backup that are verified good periodically before they are actually needed. I use hard drives for my 300GB backups (photos, videos and music) that are located in separate buildings. For my most critical 1GB worth 10 years of my labor (I am a programmer), I use Daily full backups locally to CD’s or hard drives and Mozy for cross country daily backup. I also verify that Mozy works periodically with the Web restore utility to a separate computer.

I’m most impressed with Mozy. It is the only one that restores All my files of my 1GB backup.

I wouldn’t ever want to use the internet as my sole backup for 300GB. I don’t think the technology is there yet. Hard drives are very cheap now. By using 3 of them, 2 will always have data while one is being quick formatted.

Those silly messages are funny until you see one for 3 days because Mozy can’t index your server files. Then they start looking like the programmers weren’t serious.

Mozy software is terrible! Constantly fails to backup certain files because it thinks there are hard drive errors. Carbonite and any other app can access these files just fine. Ive had to completely wipe my server side backups and start the entire upload again from scratch (after support couldn’t resolve the issue). They don’t have any support other than slow email unless you have Mozy Pro which is quite a bit more expensive. It completely rapes system resources during backups and is generally buggy. I switched to Carbonite and never looked back. It uploads easily 2x as fast and is lightweight on the system.

I tried Mozy about a year ago on a Windows XP system, and it locked up my system on reboots. So I removed it and went to Carbonite. Just tried Mozy again on a Windows 7 system, and it is working fine. I have two Windows VM’s that I’m including in my backup, and that takes time but Carbonite does not allow large enough files to back a Windows VM. I’m still using Carbonite on my Windows XP system, and will most likely continue to do that, but am happy with Mozy now on Windows 7. A 24GB. backup on 1 Mb/s connection takes a long time, but it’s almost there (finally), and has just continued to work.

So it goes.

-Roger

I’ve tried for three days now to reset my password on my account and have not had any success. I get emails from Mozy saying that someone will contact me shortly but no one ever does. Very frustrating.