Sub Ubi

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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