Mozy Backup Review: I Take Back Anything Good I Ever Said

Mozy’s online backup tool which I once loved, has turned into a total piece of CPU-cycle-eating crap.

After using Mozy for a year and referring many a friend, client and colleague to them, I must say that they have gone downhill in a BIG way and I want to publicly apologize to anyone I may have harmed in the process of raving about this now-craptastic product. Here is how my experience with the Mozy backup product went down:

After an extensive online search, I found that Mozy was the one backup that both PC and Mac users alike raved about. In fact, at the time it was also the only online backup service I could find that worked within a Mac / PC environment. When I found out that it was only about $5 a month for unlimited online storage I jumped on board. In fact, I was so excited after reading all these glowing reviews that I bought the Mac Mozy Home edition for 2 years in advance to save a little extra money.

Unlimited storage for $5 a month? Oh I knew I was SO going to exploit that…

We run a marketing and graphic design company so we have a pretty large volume of files that need to be backed up on a daily basis. I configured the Mozy Mac client and it told me that the first upload was in the hundreds of gigabytes – which took a couple of weeks to upload as I recall. Once I saw that it was backed up, I was a happy camper. I now had an off-site backup solution, so should my local backup drive and my main drive burn in a fire, I had a plan…or so I thought.

An entire year passed with Mozy installed and performing its nightly backups. I actually really liked the interface for the most part. I was able to access the logs and see what uploaded each night and from what I could tell it was doing a good job scanning all of my files and updating the backups as needed. All was good until about two months ago when I got this cool error:

“Mozy has not successfully backed up in over 7 days”

What?? So I go digging through my computer thinking it’s probably something on my end and can’t locate the problem. I looked through the logs and couldn’t really distinguish any problems so I looked to my pal Google for answers. That’s when I came across the mountain of forum posts, blog posts and general complaints about Mozy and thought “(insert expletive here)”.

I contacted support and heard nothing. In the mean time I decided (and don’t ask me why I didn’t do this earlier) to try and restore a file from their backup server. First I tried the Mozy software client and although it seemed to access the list of files on the server, it would never restore anything – the client would get stuck after trying to download even the smallest file. I then attempted to restore a file from their ultra clumsy and sluggish online interface and was told the file would be emailed to me or I had the option of paying $100 for them to send me my files on DVD. Yes Mozy – in a major file loss crisis that’s just what I want – to sit and wait for a damn DVD to come in the mail. I chose the email option and did get the 5MB test file emailed to me in about a day.

After 4 days I heard nothing from my attempt to contact support and tried looking for other ways to contact them – I found none. Finally I used the “submit feedback” option in the Mozy program to tell them again that:

1. Mozy was not backing up
2. The Mac client doesn’t restore either

After a total of 8 days I finally hear from their support department…

Here is what support says:

Hi there,

It’s been over 72hrs since we last contacted you and we have not heard back from you yet. We’ll be closing your case at this time. However, if you need further assistance on this issue, you can always reply back and your case can easily be re-opened.

Uh yeah, I don’t think so. I was never contacted by anyone and now they are telling me they are going to close my case? At this point I am just pissed. It’s been over 2 weeks and nothing is being backed up.

I email them again and tell them that I was never contacted and yet again state my issues. Finally I get an email back after another 2 days with instructions to send them the log file that Mozy created – I do so and thus begins the ongoing volley of emails going back and forth to Mozy’s customer support – each of which have at least a two day delay in between responses from their CSR.

After sending them the logs, I get this email:

It seems like an issue with the Mozy client itself, the configuration is corrupt. You might have upgraded your client from Mozy MAC 1.3.2 to 1.4.3 version. The new version of Mozy 1.4.3 requires a clean installation in order to avoid using the previous version configuration. I would request that you perform a clean install of the latest version of the Mozy client.

Ok great, I already tried uninstalling/reinstalling while I was waiting over a week to hear from you — guess what? No-dice. I did it again just to appease the CSR and yet again nothing happens.

I email them telling them their suggestion didn’t work and get this email:

Please browse to Hard drive/Library/Application support/Mozy. Look out for cache.db and state.db files. Delete them and reboot the computer. You need to configure Mozy again by selecting all files again and do a backup. This will reset Mozy to backup as per the new settings. All data that was previously backed up is safe. This would not only synchronize the data that is backed up already it would also add any newly added files for backup.

Something told me this was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. Goodie, now not only does Mozy not back up, it also can’t even find my older backed up files on their server to sync to (which is the exact opposite of what they said would happen in the aforementioned email). If it would ever successfully back up, it would be backing up all 1000 GB of data again. GRRRRRR!

At this point I have had it, it’s been almost 2 months now with no resolution from Mozy.

I have this worthless icon sitting in my taskbar, still eating CPU cycles and memory mind you (because the file monitoring seems to be the only thing that does work) for absolutely no reason.

I finally email them to tell them I want my money back and 6 days ago I got this email with no further correspondence:

Thank you for contacting Mozy Technical Support. This is to inform you that I am transferring your ticket to a technician with more resources to help resolve your issue. Further research will be done and you will be contacted shortly.

I give up.

Mozy Online Backup / Restore Quick Review:

Purchased: 8/18/08 and have used for over a year at the time of this review.

Mozy Online Backup / Restore Benefits:

• Desktop interface is easy to navigate
• Inexpensive
• Relatively quick uploads depending on your connection

Mozy Online Backup / Restore Drawbacks:

• Extremely poor customer service response times
• Automatic updates of new software often fails
• Restore process is clumsy and slow (if it works at all)
• The process to exclude files for backup is tedious
• Ultra slow file restoration downloads (if you can even connect to their restore server at all)

The Mrs. gives Mozy Online Backup & Restore 1/5
What started out seemingly great turned into a complete disaster. I am thankful that when I tested Mozy’s restore process that I wasn’t actually in the middle of catastrophic file loss or I would be writing this review from the funny farm in between med doses. I do not recommend anyone use Mozy (for personal or professional purposes) and I am sorry I ever did. I wouldn’t even use this product again if it were free… remember folks, you generally get what you pay for and for $5 a month for unlimited storage, I should have known better.

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