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.

Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.

In a recent Network World article IT Managers are warned against buying consumer class laptops. The logic implied is that higher prices mean better quality systems. Unfortunately my experience shows that paying more money by no means guarantees that you will get better systems.

In October 2007 I purchased four HP Compaq 8510p systems for evaluation for evaluation purposes, and supplied them to several end users, one of who was our corporate lawyer. Right from the beginning these systems had problems, with the ATI graphics card resetting and with the wireless cards taking over 15 minutes to connect.

Then things went downhill . Our corporate lawyer, who uses only MS Office, had blue screens every day with "infinite loop" error messages from the graphics card driver. (A little web research show that some ATI cards have suffered from Infinite loop errors for over 3 years). A driver update did nothing. HP sent a replacement for the corporate lawyers system. Within a few days the replacement system started blue screening. At the same time my laptop's graphics card started resetting occasionally. So HP sent two more replacement machines. When the first machine would not even boot, saying that the BIOS was not ACPI compliant things didn't look good. Sure enough, our corporate lawyer's machine started blue screening again, with increasing frequency. Eventually she gave it back to me, saying that it was useless. Another user has SAS on their machine. This one green screened – a first for me! (It looked like it went into character mode, showing rows of little green boxes).

With our Sox project taking up much of my time I just haven't been able to get these problems resolved. But apart from that, you really don't expect new laptops that cost about $2200 each to suffer from these problems. Out of 4 machines supplied every single one has a graphics card problem, and at least two of them have wireless problems. Including the replacement machines, the failure rate is over 100%! I am still struggling to get HP to resolve these problems.

Needless to say, we won't be buying any more HP laptops, which is a pity because I really liked them. While this experience can't be typical (if it was, I would expect HP to be out of the laptop business) it does show that paying more for laptops by no means guarantees that you will have fewer problems. If anything, considering the volumes sold, maybe it would pay IT manager to buy consumer class laptops.

Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.

Security

I am amazed - it happens so often. A laptop gets stolen, complete with the personal information from thousands of people. Look at this article from the Chicago Tribune: "A Boeing Co. employee's laptop computer that contained Social Security numbers and other personal information for 161,000 current and former workers was stolen, the company said Friday. " And then they go on to say "had no evidence that any of the personnel information ... was accessed or misused." Wonderful. Because they don't know about it, it didn't happen!

But really - haven't these IT managers ever though of using Notes clients with local encryption turned on? That is a pretty watertight solution, and no casual thief is likely to have the tool to crack Notes security. If you use "in placed editing" in the Notes client, Notes will delete temp files, preserving your security (no comments on recovering deleted temp files).

What it really needs is a comprehensive look at the security of information traveling around on laptops, and a look at tools like Notes that transparently encrypt your data. However, what we have is a gaping hole with in organizational security. Remember, it's always you an me who pay the price. If an ID thief gets our data, we are the one who spend months sorting the problem out.