[RANT]Mozy Blew it for me


Recommended Posts

[RANT]

First, a little history on why I did what I did and then what happened:

About 2 months ago, I went through a total data loss with an external Western Digtital hard drive that decided to stop working and blanked out the Master Table Of Contents. Several fruitless efforts using data recovery software yielded no results. So, I chalked it up to a loss and moved on, but this shook my entire faith in hard drives as a back up medium. Fortunately, my personal files such as family photos and important documents were safe because they were on the Mac internal hard drive.

After being burned (figuratively) by the hard drive issue, I decided that off-site backup would be the best solution because it is not only backed up via RAID and secure, but also is peace of mind because I live in an apartment complex, and you never know if your neighbor's place will go up in flames due to their stupidity. Factor in smoke damage, water damage or fire, then you can run into some loss. I went ahead and forked over the $$$ for Mozy unlimited backup and went on with my life.

Now, I am starting a home based business and have been downloading contracts, working on building the business up in prep for the grand opening. As part of this prep, yesterday, I decided to go ahead and reformat the Mac to have two accounts, one personal and one business. For those who are wondering, yes...I could have easily created an extra account and gone from there, but I figured that a fresh install would make things easier and I could selectively restore what was personal and business to each account. I now sit with 20/20 hindsight...

I go ahead and do the system format knowing that Mozy has my data, I made sure to go ahead and record my log-in information at least to go ahead and initiate the restore to my computer. This is where I ran into some troubles. I discovered that their system didn't backup my Application Support files. While this isn't a bad thing normally, it just so happens that my 1Password data and my highly important Devonthink data which contained future client information as well as my server login data for my web sites that I run. So, I end up talking to them via their chat support line which by the way is the ONLY way sans email.

They blamed me for disabling backup of the application support directory. I am not a computer novice, nor a Mac novice and know that when it comes to important program data, you don't just forget these directories. I would have never unchecked the option to include this data in my backup set. But, it did exclude it. I have challenged them on this, but they haven't even acknowledged my situation yet, other than to try the web restore option or the client restore option (Through their software). Last night, I attempted the client restore at least of my personal family photos and literally 7 hours later, it was slowly restoring my files, but the progress bar was maybe around 7%. Completely unacceptable! I am sitting on a 10meg connection which speed bursts to 20megs courtesy of Charter internet's Christmas promotion so I know that even getting a few gigs of files only takes an hour or two at the most.

UGH! I am not going to be using them anymore after I painfully restore my files and move back to manual backup to an external hard drive. I am finding this to be faster than through the internet. For what it is worth, I did try Carbonite and decided against them as it didn't backup larger than 4gb files. That was important to me as I didn't want to lose any of my virtual machines.

[/RANT]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can share your pain here, I've had similar problems with other products for four or five years and it's only in the past 4/5 months that we've settled on something which is meeting our needs.

We've quite a lot of macs at home, mac mini entertainment box, three imacs, three macbooks, a mac pro and an nc10 'hackbook'. At any time my partner (currently a student) could need to work from practically any of them so the challenge has been both to protect and sync our data reliably and these two approaches compliment one another well.

I've tried an absolute ton of stuff and always had issues, either suffering a loss of data or finding a small inflexibility that turned out to be a deal-breaker.

What we've gone for in the end is a mixture of Dropbox and Time Machine. I've 5tb of firewire storage hooked off the mac mini and each of the other macs use it as a backup target. Each machine creates a sparse bundle on the backup drive allowing them to use the same storage. Application support is backed up for each machine plus any 'key' apps but the big stuff (Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, games) is excluded. We backup documents from certain systems, partly because they're all also in dropbox and I'm keen not to waste bandwidth. Dropbox provides 1/100th the capacity of the time machine but it's usually a no-brainer to work out what gets retained where - the big stuff we need once in a blue moon goes to local disc while the small stuff which can be a bit world-ending if it gets lost is pushed to the cloud and between each machine.

Even handling iTunes content between the machines has been pretty straightforward, the 'automatically add to itunes' folder is shared from the Mac Mini and any new music gets dropped there, allowing the clients to grab stuff for remote playback using the Home Sharing. For most apps there's either been a feature or some kind of automator frippery to handle it.

Dropbox is syncing all of the user-generated content that we need between machines plus critical stuff like the 1Password keychain which in the new format syncs flawlessly (and doesn't have to live in app support nor use the old keychain format any more). One of my fave geeky features to dropbox is that if we change something on the LAN from one system it syncs locally between the dropbox peers rather than each machine grabbing their own copies from the cloud, as we're on 50mbit bandwidth isn't a huge concern but it's nice to see growl fire off on all the systems at once indicating they're in sync. The pack-rat addon gives us the same kind of undo history that Time Machine provides albeit a bit slower and has been a lifesaver on several occasions.

Email, bookmarks and calendars are synced using google bookmark sync for chrome and mobileme for safari.

What this means is that at any time all of our macs have the really vital stuff and you'd have to drop the bomb in several locations to obliterate all our data.

Hopefully you'll find something which works for you this time around, backup can (and for us now is) be an almost pleasurable experience when it's working right :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wish I could use Mozy but they don't allow the normal client version to be run on a Windows Server. Which is where I store all my files. But if I was to for example install Windows XP or Vista I could backup everything just fine. I understand this is to stop abuse from Businesses who they want to buy the Pro edition but they don't even offer a version for Windows Home Servers. There competitors Carbonite and Backblaze are the same. Backblaze wont even backup video files which is just head-scratchingly poor.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really hope you get your photos (personal stuff) back, you can always somehow or another get the other stuff but photos, videos are really something you simply can't get back

couple of months back my ext HDD also died, and lost so much data but now I developed a habit of backing up my kids photos and videos to atleast 3 places (I know this is too much).

I really hope you get those back

best of luck :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While I do feel you pain in loosing your data, also i am on your side about the un-checking of folders. Most likely it was never checked of in the first place. However have been using Mozy for about 3 years now and have had multiple drive failures. Personally i shelled out money to get the DVDs. I don't think i would ever try and do a full restore over my broadband connection. Just way too much data. I also have unlimited, my question to you is why are you not just backing up the entire drive if you have unlimited? That is what I do.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks everyone for the responses. I have been quite busy doing the game of restoration and stuff. Also, trying to get my business web site off the ground and ready for advertising locally.

As for Mozy, I ended up getting all the family photos back just not the same as I had them in iPhoto, but I did do it finally after about 1 week of battling Mozy and finally getting the 15gb download of the photos directly from their web site, that was slow as well, but not as bad as using their restore client. After about 1 day of downloading the files from their site, I at least had about 15 1gb DMG files with no description on them. Each DMG containing my files and folders in seemingly random order. :angry: With that done and having been done in terms of restoration of my "Vital files" and the accepted (on my end), write off of the lost files, I canceled my account with Mozy.

I turned around and did what I didn't think I would do again and that was buy a secondary hard drive for use as my backup/business/media center drive. It is an external Toshiba PH3100U-1EXB which I encrypted a good portion for my business using TruCrypt and the rest as normal. I let the hard drive power down normally and sleep the computer at night which sleeps the hard drive now. It has a 3 year warranty and I am working on still trying to locate a viable backup source for offsite away from the hassles of cloud backup in terms of the slow slow speeds.

I would probably use dropbox as I do love it for small stuff, but with about 120gb of data, I couldn't pay the $20/month to fall short of my backup requirements by 20gb. I checked with my web host who offers "unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth" for the personal accounts, and was told that if would be several hundreds of dollars per month to get upwards to 1tb of storage which is what I am looking for long term. I know I don't have that much, but I have filled up a 500gb hard drive with my data and home movies of us and the kid within months (all lost thanks to the drive failing).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.