Customer Reviews

Mozy Remote Backup

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This is the note I just sent to Mozy customer service as I cancelled my account: You guys have a lot of work to do with your product and service. The backup took me 5 weeks to complete - it kept crashing and your support function was totally useless in helping. Once fully backed up (never sure I was fully backed up btw) the software on my mac kept crashing. You should forward this to someone who cares, or not, but thought I would get my opinion out there. I just want my money back.

I had the unlimited version working great for awhile, but recently it stopped working. After trying the ideas mentioned in their Knowledge Base, to no avail, I emailed Tech Support. Included in the information I sent was that I was backing up 36 GB of files and had 372 GB of free space on the hard drive. They wrote back saying I needed to get a larger hard drive. So I repeated to them that I have plenty of room on the hard drive, and they wrote back again saying that I need a larger hard drive.

So I tried their Chat support feature and got a different support rep, who told me that the server on which my backups reside, had been down for a week. He asked me to try again in 24 hours. So 24 hours later I tried again, and the server was still down. Not much of a service. So I'll be moving on to something else.

Just because you have paid for the service and gotten confirmation of that payment don't assume your files are being backed up. Here is the text of an online support session I had recently:

Scott M: Welcome to Mozy Live Support my name is Scott. May i have the email address associated with this account?

ou: steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Scott M: Thank you, how may I help you today?

You: When I click on the Mozy logo it says my account has expired. I renewed it last Sept. Can you tell me what your records show.

Scott M: of course give me one moment

Scott M: ok i show your account is not set to expire till 09/21/13 can you right click on your mozy icon and select about, what version of mozy are you running?

You: 2.8.4.0

Scott M: ok please go to mozy.com/home/download install the latest client version then run a backup that message will go away

You: have my files been backed up ?

Scott M: hold on one moment and i can see when your last backup was

Scott M: I am showing your backups have not started up again after your card was declined in september, once you update the software and run a backup this should fix yourr issue

You: Once I gave them a new card number and it was accepted and I got confirmation of that the back ups should have resumed. What went wrong? You mean to tell me that all this time I have had no backups. That is unacceptable!!

Scott M: When the account was declined you would have needed to start your backups again, I am sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you however once you start your backups again this will cause your automatic backups to start running again

You: No one told me this. I assumed that when I paid you and got confirmation that the backups would have started automaticlly. You better have a supervisor call me at 775 xxxxxxx
Scott M: I am sorry but we are not compatible with phone support with MozyHome

You: Do you realize that your firm would have legal liability for lost data? I think you better have someone call me.

Scott M: I understand your frustration, however once the Backups stopped they would have needed to be started up again on the machines end, we are not able to start peoples backup from a remote location, there are messages given within the Mozy client to see when your last backup was, i am sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you

You: All you needed from me was a new credit card number which I gave you. There were no further instructions from you. I was sent a confirmation saying that my card was accepted and the service was reinstated. I have paid you for a service that you have not performed. Worse I have been led to believe that my data has been backed up. I will contact your CEO.

Scott M: I understand your concerns thank you for your feed back

Mozy is pretty and shiny on the front end while you are backing up your data, but when your number comes up and you need to restore a bunch of your data, they are horrible, absolutely horrible. And why should they care, at that point you are already a customer and you have no reason to suspect what is waiting for you behind the curtain when you suddenly need to do a restore of all your data. If you ever have the misfortune of actually having to restore your data from them - God help you from putting a bullet in your head after 7 days of fighting their incompetent support idiots and faulty software and disconnecting servers which will continuously frustrate you to the point of just wanting to die rather than deal with Mozy ever again in your life.

Mozy sucks more than any company I have ever dealt with and they make no apologies and there is no end to the hell they will put you through and never offer you a break of any kind no matter how long you tell them you have been fighting their broken pile of junk they call "the restore process". Best I can tell, they are apparently a group of evil sadists who horde your data simply for the enjoyment it brings them to listen to you toil in frustration as you try and get your data back, all those precious vacation pictures and work files and your entire music collection and bookmarks, until you ultimately give in to their extortion of paying them $250 to get your data on a $29 hard disk and just end the misery.

Google it, "Mozy restore" and read all the poor souls who did not know any better, their stories are all over the internet on every blog that discusses backup. Beware and go with someone else, ANYONE else, to backup your data. I don't care if you have to buy a new hard disk every month to keep it from crashing, it is better than dealing with Mozy on doomsday - `cause they got nothing but a pile of misery waiting for you.

Consider yourself warned, don't cry about it later and say you didn't know any better. Now you know.

First, I'm a little confused about why Mozy is being sold on Amazon at all. The software is free to download from Mozy. I could maybe buy that people want a CD since they don't have Internet access, but that kind of negates the entire point of an Internet based backup service doesn't it?

Anyway, I just wanted to chime in that I've had vastly different experiences from most of the reviewers so far. I've had Mozy on my main computer for several years now, and three other systems for about a year. I've had very few problems with Mozy. I think the worst issue I've run into was that my main system didn't want to back up for a week because of volume shadow copy issues. The issue resolved itself though.

For backing up very large amounts of data (>300GB), Mozy's pricing of $5 a month can't be beat. They might not be the speediest (uploads are capped at 1.0Mbit/s), but if you're patient enough to get the initial upload done, then backups are pretty quick... maybe an hour or two for a few gigs. Keep in mind though that this is HIGHLY dependent on your Internet connection and community usage. An 8Mb/s cable connection only uploads at 1Mb/s generally, and if it's a high load community, that can drop even further.

I just wanted to let people know that I've had great experiences with Mozy and would recommend it in a heartbeat. Also, don't buy a disk off Amazon for $XX. Go straight to Mozy and download the FREE software. :D

Mozy Version 2.4

I have used enterprise-level backup solutions for many years in my work, and adapted some to work at home, but the costs of robust commercial backup for the home were too great, so I decided to try some cloud services. My criteria for a home backup solution are: 1) security 2) reliability 3) ease of use 4) easy access to restore data 5) file versioning (history of changes available for restore) 6) low cost. I settled on Backblaze one year ago, but Mozy has improved its features and Backblaze had some issues, so this year I'm trying Mozy.

My first experience with consumer-level cloud backup was Backblaze. Problems with that service: 1) Amount of time it took to run the initial backup (10 days), 2)inability to manually designate or remove specific files from the backup set (entire directories were skipped), and 3) limited access to remote storage (inherent to cloud storage). Mozy addressed all these problems for a similar price.

Mozy meets my requirements so far:
1) Security - meets minimum: SSL security to cloud. I'd like an additional private key to encrypt my files. Mozy does encrypt your files on their servers, but I'd be more comfortable setting up the keys myself.
2) Reliability - so far, so good. The local storage helps a lot with this.
3) Ease of use - setup was easy. I'd like a few more configurable options, but it did start the backup as soon as I installed the software.
4) Easy access - Mozy did great on that. The local storage copy is exactly what's needed.
5) File versions - advertised as having this, but haven't tried it yet.
6) Cost - I have over 100GB to backup, so many cloud storage companies would charge me 2x or more than Mozy charges.

The greatest advantage Mozy has over other online services is the local storage, which is a copy of what gets uploaded to the cloud. This solves the inherent speed and access problems of using cloud storage. I backed up 98GB of files from three hard drives to Mozy online in about five days. The local backup was done in under 24 hours. Mozy lets you exclude and include files based on any criteria you choose, which solved that problem with Backblaze.

The only area where I've had problems with Mozy so far is with the user interface. Mozy has tried to make the local backup transparent to the user, which might be good for many people, but I would like to see the progress and status of the local backup separately from the online backup. Once the full backup is done, there is a report on the local backup status, but during backup, the only status visible is the cloud status. This is purely a user interface issue, since I could see that all the files were backed up locally by inspecting the local drive. The other user interface issue is with error reporting. The backup status report shows "drive full or offline" errors, but in fact, it appears Mozy is having a hard time dealing with file permissions on specific folders. I could fix this problem readily if Mozy would tell me, instead I had to dig into the logs to see what was getting skipped, and then figure it out from there. For most people, this file permission problem probably won't appear, as these files were transferred from an encrypted system under a different domain. Digging through the Mozy documentation, there is reference to failure of EFS files to local backup, but the error was not designated as such.

Without having done a full restore, I can't complete this review, but it does appear that all the files are on local storage, so I am not too worried about it. For full restores, I'll rely on the built-in Windows backup and find any files that were missed since the last full backup from the cloud or local storage. In the case of a total loss (e.g. fire or theft), I'll be happy my files are in the cloud.

There are other services with more features, like syncing to multiple computers and access to files by smartphone, but they cost more. I can up set that access on my own. I'm happy so far with Mozy. -1 star for the user interface issues. 4 solid stars assuming a restore goes well.

I recently connected an external hard drive to my PC, and they recommended the Mozy Home Online Backup Service. It quickly installed and backed up the 2GB allowance that is given free...I actually, I only chose about 1.84GB of memory to backup.
Imagine my surprise when I get a fault saying that 2.6GB had been backed up, and that I was over my allowance. I read a number of online reviews, & decided to opt for the $4.95 monthly subscription until I decided if I was satisfied.
It took just a few days to show that Mozy Home is TOTALLY UNSATISFACTORY!!
After getting repeated faults that I was still over my 2GB allowance, I live chatted & traded emails with the Mozy support staff. I was told that everything was fine with my account. I ran a defragmentation before attempting to run a backup of the approx 86GB on my hard drive(via High Speed), and also moved most of my photos to a 500gb external hard drive which I'd already backed up to.
I restarted my backup at approximately 1000PST and left for the day. I returned at approx 1700PST to find that (according to the Mozy log) my data was 12% backed up, and there was approximately 2 DAYS and 22 HOURS remaining to my Backup. I changed the slider setting on the Mozy log from its default to the Faster Backup setting.
Approximately 4 hours later, I checked to log again and found that it was now 13% backed up, and that....get this....I was now MORE THAN FIVE DAYS AWAY FROM COMPLETION!! Changing to the Quicker Backup had actually slowed things down.
I just bought a 125GB external hard drive, which will be the backup to backups I run to my 500GB EHD.
I think the "unlimited" only means it can take an unlimited amount of time to run a backup. Mozy says the first backup can take a while, but I've worked at companies where running the initial backup of a 150GB system took less than 6 hours.