back to article Mozy users caught in repeat backup hell

Users are complaining that EMC's Mozy backup service is mistakenly backing up complete data sets over and over again. According to posts in five-page Mozy Forum thread, the problem has been present since mid-June, and users say they've received inadequate support. The problem occurs with Mozy for Windows. According to users, …

COMMENTS

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  1. J. Cook Silver badge
    FAIL

    Interesting.

    Glad I keep my data where I can control what happens to it- locally backed up, and an off site copy just in case the house burns to the ground.

  2. Jamie 21
    Coat

    Mozy, eh?

    People are surprised that "Mozy" is slow?

    "A-whelp, ah reckon we'll get that thar backup done. Maybe not. Hard to say with them redskins breathin' down our necks. "

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too risky

    Too many unknows in this to trust it. They either abstract it and make it work flawlessly, or they fully document how to act in different scenarios. Fobbing customers off makes it non viable as a solution.

  4. Plankhead
    Thumb Down

    Mozy support sucks

    I have first hand experience of Mozy support..... no infact I don't, they simply ignore my emails. I have sent 2 emails about 2 weeks apart to their support and not yet received a reply. If anyone is thinking of using cloud backup services can I suggest going elsewhere (Carbonite seems quite good, and is probably what I will recommend to others).

  5. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Very simple check.

    Put a bandwidth monitor on your pc.

    Do Nothing

    If shit loads of traffic going outbound then it is backing up (or you have a malware infection).

    There, sorted.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Ah.

    ""When the automated backup started the Mozy client decided it was going to re-upload all 65GB of my backed up files from scratch, despite them not being changed in any way"

    They must have taken on the developers who left MS after writing explorer.

  7. Borneo

    Good to see

    Good to see Regular Joe experience the joys of EMC support! Tis not a bug, tis a feature.

  8. antrankine
    Pint

    Go elsewhere

    I dropped Mozy ages ago - I found their software slow and buggy. I'd recommend you go somewhere else - there are loads of better options. I use Livedrive, which seems to strip out duplicate files quite nicely.

  9. James 100
    FAIL

    Same here

    I was a Mozy customer for a while; eventually the repeat backups and unexplained failures were enough to make me switch to Backblaze, which has worked flawlessly for me so far. From what I saw, the Mozy client caches the file checksums locally - in a file which sometimes gets corrupted in some unexplained way. As a result, it then crawls through re-uploading every single file to the servers, which duly check each file against their own copy and discard the duplicates.

    In theory, eventually it gets everything back in sync at both ends ... or, as happened in my case, it re-corrupts the local checksum data and starts from scratch yet again, at which point I say something rude and switch products to one that actually works.

  10. Maryland, USA
    Thumb Up

    Mozy on over to Box.et

    Recently, Box.net began to provide free synchronization for users with business accounts. In August, the company will let all paying customers synch. I love Box.net; it integrates with LinkedIn and many more sites. I can't wait for synching. With Box, I pay more, but I get more.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone here

    tried Spideroak? They seem pretty good and cross-platform. BTW, the cloud-back-up landscape seems to have matured quite a bit, any chance for ElReg to do one of those many-pages review?

  12. jtaylor

    Unsettling news

    I'm sad to see this. Mozy has been around for a while and my impression (as a non-customer) has been that they're pretty solid -- at least as good as Carbonite or JungleDisk. It sounds like the same EMC disease that killed Retrospect (my previous system) is afflicting Mozy.

    That said, I agree with J. Cook. I advise people that they "have a backup" only if they can physically point to it. If they tell me someone else can point to their backup, then that other person "has" their backup. As long as they're comfortable with that relationship, all is well.

    After 18 months with CrashPlan, I've had no problems and have been pleased with their customer service.

    Good luck to everyone and their data.

  13. alexba

    Long-time Mozy user

    It's true for me that Mozy does upload some files that were previously uploaded and unchanged. About a month ago my PC's hard drive was replaced due to bad sectors. A CHKDSK report showed only a few, unimportant files that were in the bad sectors.

    I had a backup unrelated to Mozy that recloned the new drive to the state before the hard drive replacement. Even with a new installation of Mozy on suggestion of their tech support, I can see from the Mozy History logs that, generally, about 1/3 of the files in any one folder are being uploaded again. The files being uploaded are unchanged and not being synced with the server but take the full amount of upload time. I have spent about two weeks of almost constant uploading/syncing of my Mozy account.

    Previously, after hard drive replacement, Mozy would take a few days to sync up files with little or no uploading of unchanged files.

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