Mozy Restore Sucks
I want to apologize now to all the people to whom I’ve lauded Mozy. I take it all back. I am far from alone.
Mozy is actually a succubus, a demon sent from hell to suck the life out of men (coincidentally, one of the top 5 South Park Episodes ever). Your relationship with Mozy begins much like one with a beautiful woman. However, one morning your hard drive crashes and you realize that you’re married to Roseanne Barr. Except that she has your data. And she’s sitting on it.
My hard drive crashed. It’s been 3 weeks and I just finished recovering my data. After this experience it is pretty clear that Mozy has invested heavily in backing up your data, but had the interns write the recovery code.
My story of woe follows if you’re interested in the details. The executive summary is Don’t Use Mozy. I strongly regret having bought an annual subscription for 2 computers (instead of paying monthly).
I’m still trying to find an alternative solution. JungleDisk (S3), Carbonite and Crashplan seem to be the leading contenders.
Restoring Via Mozy
Day 1: I installed my new hard drive and used the opportunity to install Vista. I installed Mozy to restore my files, but it didn’t recognize my computer. Online help files had no information about this instance. I emailed support.
Day 3: After a bit of back and forth they sent me instructions to uninstall Mozy, reinstall it partially and then run an attached script that edited my registry. Fine. A little inconvenient, but acceptable.
I ran the script, started Mozy and went to restore my files. There were no files to restore. Nada. Not a single of my backed up files could be found. I began to grow concerned and this time I used their painfully slow live rep support IM. After much confusion, they told me that I could only do a Web Restore or order DVDs (but that my files were safe). The DVDs would cost $100 and I had no interest in waiting for physical media to be mailed, so I chose the web restore.
The first step in the web restore process is to ‘build’ a restore. I kicked off the restore and refreshed the page a few times waiting for the downloads to be ready. After 10 minutes of this I gave up. 7 hours later, my status still said 0 of 18K files ready. I was a little concerned so I emailed support.
Day 4: No word from support, so I used IM to ‘speak’ with a rep. They told me that it usually takes a day or two for restores of my size to complete. Later in the day, support emailed me back and informed me that my download was at 17.9K of 18K files. Almost there!
Day 8: Still at 17.9K. I emailed support again. A day later I was told that the issue had been escalated.
Day 12: Still at 17.9K files. Still nothing after escalation. I emailed support again.
Day 13: I’m pretty pissed at this point so I IM support. They first tell me to do something that I cannot do (start a second restore). After we get over this confusion, the rep logs into my account and uses ‘extra priviledges’ to start a new restore without canceling the first.
Day 14: My files are ready (both restores)! But I’m traveling. Mozy is quick to tell me that I only have 7 days to download the restore files before they are deleted and I have to rebuild.
Day 19: I get back to my PC under restore. All I needed to do was download 30GB in 10 separate files. Unfortunately, Mozy seems to allot more bandwidth backing up files than for downloading files. Using Flashgot, Mozy would only give me 300-400 Kbps - about 10-20% of my measured available bandwidth. Not to mention the countless timeout errors that I received from Mozy.
Day 20: After many problems downloading, I finally got my files. A handful of hours unpacking and my files are back in their rightful place. Later in the next day, Mozy emails me to tell me that all of the restores have been deleted.
Yes I did get my files in the end. But restoring files took so much time and energy on my part that I may as well have been running my own backup system. Their support utterly failed (not for a lack of good intentions though). I’m now looking at alternative solutions and will switch over as soon as humanly possible.
Update:I should add that Mozy is re-uploading every single file. So, according to the backup client, I have 6 more days until the cycle is truly complete.
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[…] I take back all the good things I said about Mozy. Mozy actually sucks. […]
You downloaded 30 GB of data in one day? (Day 19 to Day 20?) Wow… that’s really not too shabby. How long did it take you to back that much data up originally?
Truth is, it took several days, but there were enough hiccups in the process that I figured it was roughly a day’s worth of downloading.
Wow. What an ordeal. I am trying out different online backup services as well.
So far the best one I have found is http://www.elephantdrive.com . The best thing about the service is that once the files are backed up, they become immediately available for download/restore. There is no “restore” preparation process. You can download a few files or all of your backed up data. Thats kinda neat because if my laptop fails, chances are I will need some of my files quicker than others.
I have also been using the service to transfer files between work and home.
Sorry to read about troubles. We’ll let you restore up to a terabyte a day but I doubt your connection can handle that. That’s the entire problem with online backup. If you’re backing up more than a few GB, beware! Takes a long time to get back.
CrashPlan has a few cool features to circumvent this reality:
1. We let you backup on-site as well as off-site.
2. If you back up to 3 off-site locations, we’ll let you restore in parallel from all 3 at the same time, to speed things up.
3. If you back up “near off-site” – say a friends house or your office – you can restore within hours directly to a USB drive instead of over the net. Bring a Wii.. a few beers, make it a restore party! :)
S3 can’t compete – protocol is too slow. I recommend testing our backup speed, data sent, and data received. You’ll find we use far less bandwidth, and we’re far faster.
~Matthew / CrashPlan
On the subject of file backup, sharing and storage …
Online backup is becoming common these days. It is estimated that 70-75% of all PC’s will be connected to online backup services with in the next decade.
Thousands of online backup companies exist, from one guy operating in his apartment to fortune 500 companies.
Choosing the best online backup company will be very confusing and difficult. One website I find very helpful in making a decision to pick an online backup company is:
http://www.BackupReview.info
This site lists more than 400 online backup companies in its directory and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.
Dave, thanks for the link love in your post. You have my deepest sympathies. I still wake at night screaming from my Mozy nightmare….
I have new-found backup joy with my Time Capsule. It sits inside a locked closet quietly backing up 1TB of data every hour of the day…
My second piece of mind is the hard drive locked in my desk drawer that contains a fully bootable backup of my two main Macs.
My destiny is now my own- and my recovery plan is in my own hands…
My experiences with Mozy were good up to the point where Mozy backup won’t backup and quits with “FilterError0”.
At this point I recognized that the only support Mozy is offering is just and email address. So I wrote down my probs (with screenshots etc) and I sended them to Mozy. After two (!!!) weeks without any reaction, I wrote again and again and after these attemps I got an email (not an solution) from support whether I could give them information about my installed virus software. This was 2 weeks ago. So the whole thing now takes over 4 weeks. Remember, just 1 answer in 4 weeks with no solution!
By the way, I have a two year subscription (payed in advance!). I already askes Mozy whether this is the way it goes for paying customers but, guess, no answer so far.
I am very disappointed about this and maybe my experiences give some decision help on selection the right online backup provider.
I couldn’t agree with you more – I am currently going through the exact same ordeal. The restore service is not only absolutely slow – it also DOES NOT RECOVER THE SAME FILES YOU BACKED UP. This service is like an airbag which gives you the message “please wait” while you crash into a tree. What a rip-off!
Sorry to hear you’ve had the same level of “service” in dealing with Mozy as a paying customer that I experienced after evaluating their software on a free basis. At least I got what I paid for (and what Mozy is worth): $0.00.
I tried various online backup programs and have zero faith in any of them; in fact, it is truly amazing to me how bad this software is. Every single one of these programs is a resource-eating, bandwidth-wasting, false-hope-producing piece of crud. I recommend not wasting time, money or hopes on any of these BS services.
To address my daily backup needs I have a 500 Gb external drive in a USB enclosure and a 16 Gb USB key. All my data has been copied to the external drive; changed files are updated to this drive & the USB key on a nightly basis via an automated task.
I have a backup external drive at work which I swap out with the one at home on a weekly basis. The recently changed files on my USB key are copied to the hard drive on my work PC. So, I have several safeguards in place and I have achieved my goals of constant backup, easy administration, off-site storage and multiple restore locations – and I don’t bog my PC down with poorly-written junkware that fails to deliver the goods as promised.
I wholeheartedly agree. I downgraded from Vista to XP, sorry you went with Vista, you’ll regret it. I still haven’t gotten my files back. I am switching.
I’ve been backed up using Mozy for a while now. Yesterday, I realised I’d deleted a few files I wanted back (nothing critical, some vacation photos I thought hadn’t come out properly, only to discover this was actually a Photoshop issue displaying them wrongly). The good news? The 13Gb Pictures folder was backed up in Mozy. The bad news? No option to restore only deleted files: either download the whole lot to a new location, or download the whole lot over the original location.
Downloading was fine, nice and fast (a few hundred kbyte/sec), so I left it running overnight. When it finished, I was told it had failed to restore two files – but it doesn’t tell me WHICH files! Nothing in the log file, either.
In this particular case, at worst I’ve lost two photos, with a bit of luck they were both expendable anyway – but this hardly inspires confidence in Mozy: they could as easily have been my accounting application’s main database, client contact information…
Mozy is a POS!! I used it to backup a bunch of files I had on an external USB drive and it deleted them all from my online backup!!! When I needed to use the drive for something else, the backup ran and I seriously think Mozy thought I deleted the files rather than just the device being disconnected. Luckily I had made a secondary local copy of my data but if I hadn’t, my files would be gone. I’ve tried it a couple of times now and this happens every time. Who designed this POS, Donald Duck? I’ve seen high school projects work better than this.
If you read the manual you would know that when doing a backup where data is stored on an external drive the temporary file that the program uses to encrypt your data before sending to the backup site is created on the external hard drive. So when the harddrive was disconnected mozy was attempting to write to that file on the external drive and could not find it and that backup would fail and ruin the routine. Mozy needs to uninstalled and then reinstalled each time the external drive is reconnected to the computer. Yes this is silly however I believe they have resolved this insufficient method in recent Upgrades.
Please do not bash something you do not understand. The five minutes you spent writing this post you could have spent learning that this problem couldve been easily resolved!
Highly Recommend eSureIT – http://www.intronis.com/esureit-home/
eSureIT has been rock solid for me and I am very happy with it. Backups are reliable, fast, and the interface and feature layout are clean, unlike the hack job Mozy threw together. That and I have never had a problem with restores.
I also tried Mozy and it was a nightmare! It literally brought my system to its knees (probably has all sorts of memory leaks). When I actually was able to successfully backup my files after trying several times, I could never get it to restore successfully. I’ve seen viruses have less damaging impacts to a computer than Mozy's hack job.
I had tried esureIT and it was a nightmare. I was paying over $300 for 100GB of back for my CPA company. I also used tapes, but when I had an issue with one of my tapes I thought that I would be OK since I had esureIT. Sure enough, when I went to restore I could not get anything. I was really pissed, their customer service is horrible and their tech support didn't seem to even know how to fix their own product. In the end I had to pay $1200 to have the data from my tapes brought back.
After this, I went to Mozy and thier product has been great. I highly recommend them, their product backs up, is cost effective and I am still using tapes as a primary backup. I would never wish the experience that I had with esureIT on anybody. I hope that you have better luck, but I doubt that the company is any good given the very poor experience that I had.
I am a very dissatisfied Intronis customer, and would warn anyone thinking of using Intronis (eSureIT) as a backup solution to look elsewhere. Working with tech support for months, I have been unable to get their product working reliably at three different customers. The configured options are ignored, causing the program to backup 12 copies of the data offsite. No matter how many times the configuration was updated, this never changed, resulting in the customer being billed 5 to 6 times the expected amount. The backup process stalls constantly, without notice and has to be restarted. The “bandwidth throttling” does not work, so any time a backup is running (which can be weeks at first or anytime you make any changes), it consumes all of the customer’s bandwidth, which for me caused my normally happy customers to scream and rant and rave. I lost one customer because of this product, and could not move the others off of it fast enough. When I asked to cancel my contract with Intronis, they said they had no documentation for any of the issues I had experienced, and said it was up to me to provide them with the transcripts of all of the support calls (to prove the problem was with the product not working properly).
Intronis, from a customer’s standpoint, sucks. Save your money, and the headache, and go elsewhere.
I saw Mozy on a server a business associate had – it was set to backup 85GB, but nothing but errors after 15GB or so. After many months I finally got him to try the online service we have been using at work. It is a small company out of Washington state called Subterranean Data, but not a mom and pop in the garage backup type either. For those of you not satisifed with Mozy, try http://www.remote-online-backup.com It is worth the price paid – you can restore your files! Oh, my business associate was able to backup his entire 85GB using http://www.remote-online-backup.com , with one minor error – a permissions issue.
Call VENYU for online backup. They are the original online backup provider called AmeriVault. I love them and will always use their services. The costs are a bit more than what you see with companies like Mozy, but they have never had any complaints. They are a business level solution but trust me they know how to recover your data. No long waits, no recoveries failing and having to start over, just seamless recoveries with the click of a button.
I've used Mozy before as well and had the same issues.
DUDE, George, are you freaking NUTS!? No doubt that Venyu kicks ass, but they quoted me $870/month to back up my 290 GB of data. Fine for an Enterprise solution, but I think the average schmo will stick with their $5/month Mozy unlimited plan. For the record, I've successfully backed up 290 GB on Mozy, and I've successfully performed both a 1 GB and 10 GB restore (more testing to come). No telling what would happen if I had to restore all 290 GB, but I'll take my chances. If I could afford $870/month for offsite backup, I sure as hell wouldn't be driving around in a banged up 2003 yellow Mustang.
Going through a nightmare trying to restore 6GB onto a new computer. 4 days so far. Mozy non support. We'll see.
Howard
Mozy worked fine for me for almost a year (on a 2 year subscription), then it just stopped backing up. My real beef is with their tech support. I got one email back from them telling me to download the application again, which I did to no effect. Then several more emails from me went unanswered (meanwhile, no back ups). I finally had to dump Mozy and look elsewhere. I'm currently waiting to hear back from them about my demand that they refund my payment for the year I'm not getting. Good luck, huh?
Did you try using their IM support method, you would have gotten an immeadiate response and possibly and immeadiate solution.
Also, you should always have multiple backup systems in place if your data is that vital to you. Simple external hard drive or two would probably have been sufficient. most important rule to data backups is repetition.
Is anyone else having trouble restoring files from Mozy backup? I uploaded several pictures I wanted to protect but have not been able to restore them. Based on the comments here, I think I made the wrong choice. MOZY appears to be a pile of CRAP!!
have you found a alternative?
Try NetCDP http://www.netcdp.com, back up to amazon S3.
If you are looking for an alternative to Mozy or Carbonite. We just launched our Data Protection service online at http://www.tomnica.com . Not only it provides a great backup service but it also allows you to wipe or encrypt data in case your device gets lost or stolen. Finally, you can monitor your device: screenshots, webcam + location. All those services in 1 package with a neat web interface. We have a free plan for 1 year. Try it out and let us know what you think.
Laurent Luce
Director of Software
Tomnica, Inc.
I thought that Mozy was the perfect solution to migrating all of my files to a new computer. Instead, I’ve spent 2 weeks – not quite your 20 days, but hey, I'm not done yet – trying to restore my files. The time it takes to restore files is generally a few days for the amount that I have. I am not able to sit at my computer and monitor the little green progress bar for 48 hours straight, so it never fails that when I turn my back on the computer, I return to a “connecting to server” message. Is my restore starting over again? I just don’t know. I have some shortcut icons in my programs list that have 8 copies. Is this because they are the first files to be restored each time I start back up and keep adding new file copies? So I have 8 shortcuts to Adobe reader, but 98% of the other files on my computer are inaccessible.
I also went the web restore method, as recommended by the IM support – I am currently killing time while waiting for those files to download for the second time (the first time they wouldn’t open in my unzip program). We’ll see if I can even get the content onto my computer. If I do, I was told by support that I will have to manually move each file to the location that I’d like it to be in on my computer. So much for the selling point of automatically restoring files to their original location (this perk only applies to the desktop restore option – which I think we’ve established just doesn’t work.)
I would have been better off taking a few days and transferring everything via a 3.5" floppy disk, back and forth from old to new computer. It would have taken a long time, but couldn’t be nearly as frustrating as the mozy restore process.
My restore experience with Mozy is an absolute nightmare! My hard drive crashed a month ago and I am STILL struggling to get a full restore. Their support isn't good – I send emails and get unhelpful replies over 24 hours later that don't even address the issues clearly explained in my emails. Interacting with their support people is like the old Abbott and Costello's 'Who's on First' skit.
As soon as I get all my data back (which is actually starting to look like it won't happen – there seems to be a problem with very long filenames getting backed up properly), I'm dumping them and warning everyone I can to STAY AWAY.
It really is too bad. They seemed so promising but they blew it!
My client has Mozy and I am trying to restore 2 simple files from a nightly file share which is 4.5GB in size, and I couldn't find the files using the Mozy client restore tab, so I had to call support. The original subdirectory that was backed up has 13 files minus the the two that were deleted today, so it should have 15 files in this subdirectory. It is is configured to backup everything (full backup not incremental or differential, I thought), yet the online backup shows 8 files in the subdirectory that I can restore, none of which are the 2 I need. The Mozy engineer is confused also, as to why not all of the files were backed up.
I'm an IT support person and I just got a call from the client wondering why a restore of 2 simple files has taken 30 min already and no files restored. She's going to recreate her files instead and I look like an idiot. I have a local backup also but thought Mozy restore of these 2 files would be quick and easy. Oops (drools on self).
After we got disconnected and I called him back, the engineer says the only "full" backup is the initial Mozy backup. Thereafter, they are incremental. I didn't know that, and whatever, but my problem is that I can't find the files, even using the Mozy search box. One of the files is "Doctor Lease.doc" and searching for "Doctor" returns nothing. How should I know when it was backed up since all these nightly backups are incremental? He tells me to look in the history, but I'm not going to look manually through that many history files, and why should I have to?
They opened a case for me with 2nd level support to find the files, which I emailed him the names of. I'm supposed to hear back "within 24 hours". Needless to say I won't ever choose Mozy again. Thank you all for the suggested alternatives above.
Sounds too me like this problems are all related to uninformed or non-computer savvy people. Mozy is mainly designed for corporate and enterprise level consultants to either to their clients or have the IT department monitoring. I am a Compute/Software Consultant/Developer for small -mid sized businesses and love Mozy. It is one of the best products I support. I have never had an issue and any questions I have mozy is quick to answer compared to other companies such as carbonite. First off I have been dealing with local Backup solutions for my clients for 10+ years now and let me tell you Mozy is by far the most user friendly, comprehensive backup system I have every used. The one lesson I learned a long time ago is no matter how experienced you are with backup systems there is one thing you should always do before installing the software for use (or for any software package your business relies on!)….READ THE DAMN USER MANUAL!!!!!. How many of you actually read the entire User Manual before you began using Mozy.
If you did then
1.) keith would know that mozy is not designed (and I can't find anywhere that is supports it) to preformed to full backups, not to mention it doesn't make sense to do a full backup everyday with gigabytes of information being transfered everyday, it is a waste of bandwidth, leave more room for error, and often impossible for data sets over 20 GBs to do a full backup every day, especially when a client is using comcast as a internet provider (horrible upload speeds) or flat impossible with DSL (about 3-5 GB ,max for DSL and drastically slows the network), Thus why differential backups are the only logical and usually humanly possible backup method given the current state of bandwidth technologies.
2.) Green tea might have checked to make sure that here computer was not set to go into Sleep Mode or Hibernate Mode after 1 hour of Idle time and maybe her internet connection would have not been dropping out every time she tried to do a recover.
3.)R.G. did you check your backup report daily to ensure that your were getting successful backups everyday? Maybe your storage quota maxed out. Maybe you needed to upgrade your software? Maybe, the Mozy client piece stopped running on your computer. How well did you stay on top of monitoring your backup. That is your responsibility, you can setup mozy to alert you when a backup fails or has not completed after X number of days. It is your responsibility to make sure your backup is running successfully every day (or however ofter you have it set)!! Mozy can only do so much.
Kuros- Did you attempt to limit the bandwidth or limit the Computer Speed vs Backup Speed ratio in the settings? Also, you could have set the backups to run at night when you are not using the computer, or only when the computer is not in use and have been idle for X amount of time. this would've eliminated bringing your system "to it's knees"
You guys get my drift….don;t sit here and bash something that you took no responsibility for when you started using it. things don't jsut work, especially computers. A computer only does what it tells you to do and you can't expect mozy to read your mind and configure your backup for jsut the way you want. Also, it is the responsibility of the user make sure their backup is running successfully on a daily basis. Lastly, the most important thing with backups is repetition! Always haave repetition. All my clients running mozy also have local tape drive or hard drive backup running at least once a week. tape drives run a on a two week cycle and the first tape of each cycle is taken off site incase of fire or water damage. Hard drives run atleast 3 rotating drives and every a dvd of the back up is made from the hard drive and taken off site.
I suggest utilizing all the Alert features. You can also setup for the administrator to receive a daily monitor report which tells you everything you need to know about the success of your backups.
Furthermore, I would never use free software for something as important as data backup! Remember you get what you pay for, and mozy is no exception. The benefits of being a paying customer with Mozy Pro are exceptional and well worth it. IMHO, almost every issue posted here could've been avoided by simply paying $5 extra bucks/ month for the pro version.
Also, Vista Blows! I refused to sell my clients computers with Vista Pre-Installed or Upgrade their systems to Vista. The problems and annoyances are endless. So sorry to hear you have to suffer with that. However, running Win 7 Ultimate now, and it's not too bad, actually I kinda like it, come cool features.
I hope everyone here learned their lesson on how important it is to monitor your backups and that it is your responibility to do so!
These stories are all to common. Sometimes free isn't always free. Check out backazon.com online backup. Secure Amazon S3 servers and its 24/7 LIVE tech support. That's right a PERSON answers the phone. Also uses versioning so if you delete a file on accident its never gone from your backup.
Cheers
Eric
Same experience here with Mozy. Used them for 2 years. Paid every penny of it. Now trying to restore 2 files (700 MB in size) and it fails via Explorer extension. So support tell me try web download, tried it and it shows "restoring" and immediately going to "expired" after few minutes without any warning or anything else. Apparently I paid for privilige of "backup" but not "restore". I'm evaluating CrashPlan right now and it appears much better then Mozy crap. Same functionality (almost) but also adds ability to backup to external hard drive on separate machine or even to your friend's computer. Totally cool idea and implementation. Will be dumping Mozy if online backup with CrashPlan succeeds (currently at 4% of 120 GB I'm backup up).
Hopefully something will read it and will prevent trying out something which will leave you cold with nothing when time will come to "restore". I created support ticked with Mozy, went through different online chats but so far a week later nothing.
Same experience here with Mozy. Used them for 2 years. Paid every penny of it. Now trying to restore 2 files (700 MB in size) and it fails via Explorer extension. So support tell me try web download, tried it and it shows "restoring" and immediately going to "expired" after few minutes without any warning or anything else. Apparently I paid for privilige of "backup" but not "restore". I'm evaluating CrashPlan right now and it appears much better then Mozy crap. Same functionality (almost) but also adds ability to backup to external hard drive on separate machine or even to your friend's computer. Totally cool idea and implementation. Will be dumping Mozy if online backup with CrashPlan succeeds (currently at 4% of 120 GB I'm backup up).
Mozy web restore sucks and their technical support is useless. I am trying to restore about 20 gb over a 35/35 mbps connection but each download is interminably slow and usually locks up at about 15% of the download with no way to restart/resume. I've emailed them and chatted with them and get a lot of promises but no action whatsoever. This has been going on for three days now with no end in signt/ If only I had known that they were a terrible company I never would have entrusted my key business files to them. I wonder how they ever got a good rep?
I called support about a huge charge that is obviously a billing error. After selecting "Billing" on the automated system, I was connected with some guy who could not speak clearly and sounded like he was standing next to an airplane. I constantly had to repeat myself loudly spelling out each word phonetically. All that aggravation just for him to tell me that he could not help me and that I would have to wait until Monday.
The day before, I could not log into my account and attempted to use the "Live Chat". After waiting for 15 minutes as the "Next in queue" the person on the other end could not help me and I had to contact the SALES department of all things. The sales lady was nice and resolved my issue in about a minute or so.
This, accompanied with the fact that we do not have access to any reseller tools any longer has reached my limit of patience and has become more trouble that it is worth.
I will be turning to Acronis for my managed backup solutions. Mozy is obviously not cut out to offer a solution for managed IT services.
If I ever want to backup photos of dear old granny, I may catch you on your free home edition. Other than that, I have no use for this hassle.
Later
This is pretty intriguing. I'm planning to do a review of web backup services soon, and I was going to investigate all that offer free online backup services – I notice that mozy offer a free 2GB service and so I'm going to try that out and see if it is as hard with the free service.
I'll come back and let you know how I get on.
I gave up on Mozy, then they cancelled my account. The client slowed my computer to a crawl and consistently started over on backups. Good riddance. They did backup my external drive, though, which Carbonite WON’T do.
Mozy is pretty and shiny on the front end while you are backing up your data, but when your number comes up and you need to restore a bunch of your data, they are horrible, absolutely horrible. And why should they care, at that point you are already a customer and you have no reason to suspect what is waiting for you behind the curtain when push comes to shove. If you ever have the misfortune of actually having to restore your data from them – God help you from putting a bullet in your head after 7 days of fighting their incompetent support idiots and faulty software and disconnecting servers which will continuously frustrate you to the point of just wanting to die rather than deal with Mozy ever again in your life.
Mozy sucks more than any company I have ever dealt with and they make no apologies and there is no end to the hell they will put you through and never offer you a break of any kind no matter how long you tell them you have been fighting their broken pile of crap they call “the restore process”. Best I can tell, they are apparently a group of evil sadists who horde your data simply for the enjoyment it brings them to listen to you toil in frustration as you try and get your data back, all those precious vacation pictures and work files and your entire music collection and bookmarks, until you ultimately give in to their extortion of paying them $250 to get your data on a $29 hard disk and just end the misery.
I am now totally convinced the CEO of Mozy is the devil himself, having tried to restore 150GB from them and survived, it is the only rational conclusion for what they so happily put you through. No one but the devil would delight in extending your misery as long as possible and offering no escape or relief from the madness and insanity that IS the Mozy system. Beware and go with someone else, ANYONE else to backup your data. I don’t care if you have to buy a new hard disk every month to keep it from crashing, it is better than dealing with Mozy on doomsday – ‘cause they got nothing but a pile of misery waiting for you.
Consider yourself warned, don’t cry about it later and say you didn’t know any better. Now you know.
A lot of people on here seem to have little knowledge of backup technologies and therefore have over-inflated expectations. For example, Mozy uses source-based-dedupe at the block level and therefore never does traditional full, incremental or differential backups. If you want to test this then try running a mozy backup, copying a large word doc to a new file, edit the copy and add one word then re-run the Mozy backup and see what the size of data is which is transferred. It will be the size of the word, compressed and even realise that the rest of the file if effectivly right-shifted A traditional full, incremental or differential backup would backup the whole new copied file. Mozy doesn’t.
That said, you guys still have a point when the restore website disconnects you or doesn’t actually find a file which was backed up. That’s cr*p. But as far as I can see, that’s the exception, not the rule for Mozy. Especially since the original post was created over 3 years ago and we’re still commenting on it! :-)
MOZY SUCKS!!
Why is it my fault they did not update nor notify me that THEIR software and servers were not working????
STAY AWAY!! THESE PEOPLE ARE EVIL!!!!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Hello Kevin,
We appreciate your long membership with Mozy. I’m sorry that you feel you aren’t subject to the EULA, but before installing the software or signing up for the Mozy service you had to agree to those terms before you could even start using Mozy. Every Mozy user is bound to this same agreement.
The service has been functioning, storing your previously backed up data. Mozy has backed up 114.9 GB of data from your computer, and that data is still available for restore at this time, we’ll be happy to help you get that data restored to your computer. However, as the tech had previously stated there was an issue the Mozy software on your computer, the software version you were using is out of date and security settings on your computer may have been preventing the auto-update from processing. This has prevented the Mozy software from completing a fully successful backup for some time, although it has completed partial backups with errors that would be reported in the Mozy history, and also shown in the Mozy status window on your computer.
It looks like you have several large Outlook PST files totaling 7.5 GB, along with 59 files in your “Documents” folder, and about 107.38 GB of data from your “Music” folder. This data is all available to restore, and I can make sure we restore it to your new computer.
Its critical that you as the user select which data you want Mozy to back up from the Mozy Settings window. Unless you specify certain data to be backed up with Mozy, the software has no way of knowing which files are important to you and as a result may not back up all the data you need.
I’d like to address the specific issues you’re calling out:
1) As I stated above we can restore all of the 114.9 GB of data to your new computer, however the way Mozy functions is as a backup of your computer’s current data, not a long-term archival storage. This means that if the data is not a part of your current selection for backup with Mozy, it will not be retained on our services indefinitely after you upload it. We can restore data that was a part of your backup selection within the last 30 days of your most recent backup to the Mozy servers. In your case, your most recent backup attempt was on 11/27/11, so at this point the furthest we can go back to restore your data is 10/28/11.
2) I hope that we can restore the data you need. However, if a refund is necessary, per the terms of the EULA you agreed to for using Mozy, we can only refund the unused portion of your current biennial plan if you cancel the service. Because of the circumstances of your situation I’d like to offer an extension of your current Mozy subscription as compensation for the trouble you’ve had to this point. We’ll also make sure the Mozy software is set up, and properly configured on your new computer so that the data you need is backed up going forward.
3) Mozy is not responsible for any additional recovery measures you may go through to restore your data. We will do our absolute best to try and restore any files you back up to our servers, but data that is on your computer’s hard drive that wasn’t backed up to Mozy, or that is no longer a part of your current backup is entirely outside our reach to restore.
I’d like to take a look at the data your technician has provided to you showing that the files have transferred from your end, that may help us investigate what happened during your previous transfers with errors. For reference, the 3 most recent backups sent from your computer to our servers were as follows:
Date Time(MST) Backup Type
—————————————————-
11/27/11 14:33 Automatic Backup
11/25/11 20:11 Automatic Backup
11/16/11 14:56 Automatic Backup
Again, Mozy’s software notifies you via the Mozy status window of errors or failed backups, but you do not get emails about your backup status. You can check the backup status at any time by logging into your account at http://www.mozy.com as well, and you can do this from any device with web access.
Regards,
Michael Hamilton
Mozy Support Supervisor
————— Original Message —————
Sent: 1/25/2012 1:08 AM
To: caseupdate@mozy.com
Subject: Re: Case 00756064 Re: my files were deleted – Closure Notification [ ref:00D57gl2.5005Ert2a:ref ]
Michael –
I have been a customer since 2006. I have paid you faithfully every year
for services I have yet to see. This is FAR to long of a period where you
do not notify me that something is wrong with our arrangement. I don’t give
a crap about what the contract states. As of today, your services were
never render