Backup software for the home: A review of Mozy

I consider myself to be an IT professional after spending most of my career in IT. A while ago I realized that my backup strategy on my own home PC was not very professional. Much like security, backup is a layered approach, designed to reduce risk. This means you should not just stop at one backup solution. I have a Seagate USB backup drive, but the problem is that if there is something like a house fire, you can lose your backups. Since we keep all our family videos and photos on the PC, the thought of losing all of that in a house fire was just too painful to bear. After some research, I signed up with Mozy in June 08. One of the appeals of Mozy was the unlimited personal backups for just $5 per month because I have over 800 GB of data.

Fast forward about 2 years. A few months ago my XP home computer required rebuilding because it was the easiest way to resolve problems that had developed. It was also an opportunity to increase the size of the hard disk. Also, although I had two backups, the most prudent approach was to buy a new hard drive, and not reformat the old one. Then the unexpected happened – first the Seagate drive demanded that I create new partitions. It has lost all my data! No idea why this happened, but nothing I could do would get my data back. Then when I set up Mozy on the new hard drive, about 75% of my files seemed to have vanished. Although Mozy’s documentation makes moving your Mozy account to a new PC look simple, it really isn’t. In my case, the old hard drive was installed as a 3^rd drive on the PC, and I was able to copy all the files across to the new drive, and no files were lost. And when Mozy was doing the initial backup of the new hard drive, it found most of these files on the Mozy system. Perhaps they were not lost after all, but they certainly weren’t visible in the recovery pane. My suggestion is that if you are moving Mozy from one system to another; do not delete the old system in Mozy. Rather create a new system on Mozy, and only once you have all your files on the new system, delete the old one from Mozy. It will cost you $5 per month extra, but at least you won’t lose any data. While prudence had paid off (i.e not reformatting the old drive), it was a bit sobering to think that both backups had failed.

One other thing to bear in mind is that it would take several weeks to download 800 GB from Mozy. Under these circumstances it makes sense to backup to a USB drive anyway, because restoring from such a drive is so much faster.

As a family we have a daughter and son at University, and both of them were set up with Mozy from day one. It is just too easy for a laptop to be damaged or stolen a few days before a term paper is due… with Mozy you don’t have to worry about it. However, it turned out that although Mozy was set up on my son’s laptop, for some reason it was only backing up 800k of files. It was several months before I noticed that problem. Don’t ever think that Mozy is “set and forget” – you need to monitor that it is working as expected.

A while after rebuilding my PC I added some new folders to Mozy, but they weren’t getting backed up – they were just ignored. Tech support led me though a sequence of steps that resulted in Mozy copying  a big part of my 800 GB back up to the server again. Tech support said “[Mozy]…also backs up files that it feels need to be backed up again to ensure data integrity and the security of your files. The steps that we have taken actually rebases your machine so that everything syncs up and this issue doesn't happen again.” I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I certainly hope this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. It’s important to bear in mind that ALL non-trivial software has bugs, which is another reason why you need to regularly monitor that Mozy really is doing what you expect.

Part of the above sequence of steps involved removing and re-installing Mozy. When the new setup was complete, Mozy did an initial scan of my system which took about 20 minutes. But there was no status bar, nothing saying what it was doing – the Mozy client appeared to be frozen. Another place where this freeze problem appears is when there are a large number of files selected for backup in the Mozy setting windows, and you want to edit your selection. In one case the hour glass was still there 5 hours later. Another annoying problem that appeared was that after working for a day to two, Mozy would suddenly just stop backing up. Pausing and restarting the backup doesn’t resolve this; the only way around it seems to be a reboot.  One more minor problem that showed up was that if you reboot while Mozy is part of the way through a backup, you lose the backup history. You must manually pause the backup before rebooting to ensure the backup history is recorded.

What I like about Mozy

• $5 per month for unlimited personal storage is very good value, especially if you keep your family videos on your hard disk.
• You can back up local hard disks, USB disks and even NAS (network attached storage) drives. Competitor Carbonite only backs up local hard drives; you can’t back up USB or NAS drives.
• A central console on the Mozy web site that monitors all your PCs, and shows you when they last backed up. Great when your kids are away at college.
• The background backup works very well and you can control how much it slows down your PC. In practice, it is barely noticeable.
• You can recover old versions of files going back 30 days. Very useful if you make an unintended change that can’t be undone.

Problems I have with Mozy

• Mozy advertising claims “Set and forget”. Not a chance. Log into your Mozy account and verify your backups at least once per quarter, preferably once per month. And occasionally restore a file from Mozy just to verify things are working as expected.
• Mozy often just sits there, and you might think it is frozen. In reality it is doing something in the background – usually scanning files.
• After working for a few days, Mozy sometimes just stops for no apparent reason. The only way to resolve this problem seems to be a reboot.
• Mozy helpfully displays the backup speed in the status Window. Normally I get about 1.7-1.9 Mbs, but sometimes for hours on end Mozy drops down to 100-200 kbs. But testing the upload speed of my network connection with tools like dslreports.com show plenty of bandwidth. This suggests a problem at Mozy’s end.
• Mozy deletes backups after just 30 days. I feel this is just too short, which is why at work I selected Iron Mountain’s ConnectedPC online backup for our company – they keep your backups for 90 days.
• When moving Mozy to a new hard drive, about 75% of my files apparently disappeared from the backup. Mozy documentation leads you to think it is a simple painless process to move a Mozy account between PCs, but it is not. Plan out any such move between PCs very carefully.

Improvements Mozy could make

• If the Mozy client is busy doing something, they should have a status bar that is continually updated with the progress so that you know it is not frozen. This is one of the areas where Mozy most needs to improve.
• Allow you to store files for more than 30 days, even if they charge you slightly more, e.g. $5 for 30 days, $7 for 90 days.
• Fix the problem where backups just randomly slow down or stop working.
• Improve their documentation showing you how to move a Mozy account between PCs.

Conclusion

Mozy is a very reasonable solution for the individual or home user, although there is room for significant improvement in the product. But if you are serious about backing up all those photos etc, don’t rely solely on Mozy. Add a decent USB backup solution in tandem as well.