Jan 08 2008
Mozy is a horrible choice for automated backup
Using the Mozy backup service has turned out to be a horrible choice on my part.
In near the start of 2007, I purchased a new MacBook to replace my Powerbook that had been stolen. I suffered a hard drive failure, but had good backups. When the drive was replaced, I went ahead and subscribed to Mozy, which provided an automatic means to backup all of my pictures and other important data.
In October of 2007, my hard drive failed again. I had 30GB of data backed up on Mozy.
I tried using their desktop client to restore my data; somewhere in the middle of a 600MB test recovery (just one (large) folder), it said that one or more files were corrupted, and could not be restored. Mozy’s software neither 1. told me which files were corrupted, nor 2. was capable of restoring everything except those files. Either of these things would have been useful.
I had several very unsuccessful rounds with incredibly poor support from Mozy. One person did tell me the names of the five (!!!!) files that were corrupt in that one 600MB folder. That’s five files out of several tens of thousands of files. If that sounds like a small number to you, consider that some of those files were part of the Google TechTalk that I presented last April. (I have other archives of this, but my point is that a single metadata file inside of the presentation archive corrupts the whole presentation.)
I then tried using the WWW restore. It took a long time to download 30GB of data. I then started to decrypt it using their decryption utility. Again, somewhere in my archive are “corrupt files” that cannot be decrypted. The decryption tool fails, and refuses to go further.
I’d like to point out that I have bazillions of files in those 30GB. I have no idea which files are corrupt. Nor does Mozy’s software seem willing to report this information to me (a feature that would be very, very usable to me). Furthermore, I have no idea why those files are corrupt in the first place. For them to be corrupt implies to me that Mozy’s software corrupted them at the time of backup. How could their software completely fail to do robust checksums on backup, I’ll never know… because it did it silently, and any logs of its transgressions were lost with the death of the hard drive.
Either way, I currently have 30GB of data that I cannot decrypt because of some unknown number of bad files within the millions contained in the restore. Mozy has failed to provide me with instructions (despite multiple requests) on how to decrypt my data using tools other than theirs. Given that the data is encrypted using a 448-bit Blowfish cypher, I assume I can use OpenSSL or similar to do the decryption… but this should not be necessary. And, given that it is necessary, it should at least be possible, and ideally, documented.
Am I near-ranting-frothing? Yes, and no. This is now months past; I’ve given up on the data. It is gone. (I still have the 30GB restoration images, but I have no way of doing anything sensible with them.) I put my faith in a crap backup solution. Mozy provided a completely worthless service for which I paid $5/month for a number of months, and now that money, like the data, is gone. I cannot recommend Mozy to anyone, and have no reason to believe that their tools work in a robust and reliable way. Additionally, I have no way of decrypting my own data except through their closed-source, proprietary tools. Until I figure out how to do that through some other mechanism, it means that data backed up using Mozy’s software is not only suspect (because Mozy will clearly silently corrupt data while backing up), but it is also a hostage situation, because only their software can decrypt your data.
My hope is that there are enough keywords in this weblog post so that people will find it when researching Mozy, see my rant, and say “Maybe there is some other way I could back my data up that doesn’t involve giving it to a company that writes buggy software and then provides poor support for such a mission-critical application.” I had hoped that it was an affordable, easy, reliable backup solution. I was wrong, and given the things I’ve been reading lately, I should have known better.
In short, Mozy is buggy software that is unsafe and cannot be trusted for the backup of your data. Use anything else. My next experiment is with Amazon S3 via JungleDisk.
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I have been using JungleDisk for my backups for over a year now. Very happy with them. No problems recovering data as of yet. JugleDisk Plus add some nice features (http://www.jungledisk.com/plus.shtml).
I am also not worried about Amazon disappearing. I know of at least one online backup company that has disappeared. Not what you want for your backups.
[...] I’ve just read a post by my friend Matt over at Sub Ubi about his experience with Mozy. “In near the start of 2007, I purchased a new MacBook to replace my Powerbook that had been stolen. I suffered a hard drive failure, but had good backups. When the drive was replaced, I went ahead and subscribed to Mozy, which provided an automatic means to backup all of my pictures and other important data. [...]
Wow. That’s scary.
I’m coming off a bad backup experience myself: my Macbook Pro’s drive crashed while I was at a conference in Holland, and I had a fun couple of days of buying a new drive at 150% of the US price, installing it, and extracting the data from the dead drive (except for a couple dozen randomly selected files that got borked).
The first irony is that I got religion after my last drive crash (this was #3), and I cloned my drive before I left for Holland… but the limo to the airport came 30 minutes early, and it turns out that Carbon Copy Cloner made it through everything but my home directory. To quote a great man, “Doh!”
The second irony is that this makes 3 times that I’ve lost a drive, without a good backup, and nonetheless managed to recover almost all the data. Matt, on the other hand, has a well-planned backup solution and nonetheless comes out scrod.
The third irony is that I recently discovered how lucky I was that my drive crashed then. Turns out it’s one of the “firmware v. 7.01″ Seagate drives, which started dropping like flies around November… in a horrendously final sort of failure mechanism where the head crashes into the platters and cuts giant grooves in them. If my drive hadn’t borked out in the [very recoverable] fashion that it did, there’s a good chance I would have gone merrily on my way until it blew itself up. There but for the grace of God…
Anyway, now I have full-blown backup religion and am making multiple redundant clones every week.
Bummer about your data. I’ve been backing up to Mozy for a few months now, but have not had a need to recover yet…..
However, with CompUSA going under, I grabbed a 500Gb external drive last week and have Mac’s Time Machine doing additional back ups. Hopefully I’ll never need to use it or have the problems you do. Have you considered an external drive?
Hi – sorry to hear about that but at least you stopped me trying Mozy (it is 9 months later – maybe they’ve improved?)
Have you looked at Carbonite? someone recommended them to me.
Thanks for your post
It 1/11/09 and I’m having the same experience. In my case the key doesn’t appear to work. Funny, it’s the name of my business and was written w/o caps, so it was a no brainer, but after trying 20 variations (just in case), none of them work.
I’ve decided that Mozy is NOT ready for prome time and their customer support truly is the pits. Do not make the same mistake. I’ve wasted $55 and hundreds of hours of time.
I posted before.. I tried Carbonite and couldn’t even get the installer to work properly! Support did not help.
So I tried Mozy.. I’ve been using Mozy for a few months now and have had no issues at all. I’ve found the app to be unobtrusive and reliable. I have over 300GB backed up. I’ve also tried restoring with no issues. I’d suggest taking another look. Maybe the EMC connection has helped Mozy improve. The alternative of JungleDisk + Amazon is more expensive and more work, even if it is cooler
Totally agree. I’m having a simliar problem — only some of the files in the archive decrypt correctly, others fail. This service sucks. Tech support is useless, i’ve been going back and forth with them for 3 weeks and made 0 progress.
Mozy is still rubbish. They work well for small data sets but Mozy Pro I’m paying 24$ a month for is CRAP! It has been trying for over a month now to back up 33GB of data. It chokes on MS Exchange file that it simply cannot handle!!! Starts again every time and simply kills internet for the whole office. Mozy supports are ‘investigating’ the bug… Seems that I have to pay to test their beta software. Reliabily – 0% Avoid paying for this crap!
I work for a backup company based in the UK. We are specifically designed for business, built on Connected and LiveVault technology from Iron Mountain Digital. We are clearly not your target market because a) we are based in the UK and b) we are much more expensive than what you are used to paying. We justify this by offering the world’s most trusted technology (Connected is used by Google, Amazon and Cisco: note: Google and Amazon – who offer their own backup solutions including JungleDisk – don’t even use their own technology because it just won’t cut it – why trust a company that made itself famous by selling books with your critical data? They’re not software developers, they’re librarians) coupled with guaranteed 24/7 support.
So why am I here telling you this? Well mainly because I am sick to death of Mozy and Carbonite’s forum sharks. Mozy, in particular, are renowned for employing people to specifically lurk blogs and comment/refer/endorse Mozy products under disguise. For example, ‘Tech Blogger’ above. It makes my skin crawl. They are all over Twitter and question forums where people are genuinely looking for help. So beware.
And remember, if you pay peanuts – expect to find monkeys.