Mozy sounded too good to be true (and appears to be).
I have been hunting for a viable cross-platform replacement for Connected.com’s online backup (which is available only for PCs). Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to like about Connected.com. The UI is great, automated backup and restore (with versioning) just works, and you can encrypt your data with a private key (which is essential for a law firm – or anyone who cares about their data, for that matter).
What I don’t like about Connected.com is the price. It ends up being about $2.50/GB/mo. I also don’t like the silly plans. I want to just pay for what I use, and I just maxed out there latest “plan.” Nice plan.
I tried JungleDisk, which promises $0.15/GM/mo (and no plans), but it was clunky (would not install on all XP machines), did not support versioning, and created lots of temp files on my computers (both XP and OS X). No thanks.
So when I heard about Mozy (and its business counterpart MozyPro), I was very excited. Here was a business-class backup solution that appears to have it all: reasonable pricing ($0.50/GM/mo + $3.95/machine/mo), versioning, and private key encryption.
Except for the alleged private key encryption. Mozy’s website claims to support private key encryption. But if you install MozyPro with the default options, you will not be prompted for any private key encryption option, and all of your data will be encrypted with one of the Mozy-supplied keys. At least that’s how it worked for me. And I’ve got screen-shots of all 13 screens to demonstrate how private key encryption works (or fails to work, in this case).
Compounding matters, I’ve been calling and emailing Mozy support about this since 05/19/07 (two and a half weeks, which is a long time to wait for a backup service). My emails go unanswered. I just called both numbers (801-756-2331, 877-669-9776), and after being on hold for a long time, I was transferred to a busy signal.
I’m so glad I purchased eight licenses. If this is how Mozy treats it business customers, I can’t imaging how it treats consumer customers.
It seems to me that Mozy is not ready to be a reliable backup provider for businesses. Certainly not if private key encryption matters to you.
Been trying to do restores to another computer after my RAID array failed on my MOZY backed up machine.
Total fail. Trying with three different computers and different browsers. The web restore is utter junk. I will not be renewing my subscription once I manage to get all my files back .
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I must admit to being quite disappointed with Mozy on my MAC. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I strongly considering moving off this already. I have not completely wrote mozy of yet, but it is proving to be very unreliable. So far only managed to copy 16Gb in nearly 2 weeks and a lot of manual intervention from me. I am not sure if there is a good online back up service provider out there? My company is considering moving to Mozy to back up all PC’s and laptops. With the current service I am experiencing, I’ll be recommending that hold on.
After lousy support from MozyPro, meaning it took five weeks to solve a problem on one of our Macs, and inconsistent backup on the other, I thought I had experienced the worst from this software. Then on my Mac Power PC strange things started happening. None of my Adobe Products would open, and none of my printers would work. Then my computer would not even restart. I spent many, many, frustrating hours trying to solve this problem. At last, I was able to get things working okay again after repairing permissions and restarting my computer several times.
Fortunately I found a thread on an Apple forum that said this sort of thing could be caused by the latest version of MozyPro for Mac, which was on my computer. Then I noticed that my computer was fine until MozyPro ran a backup, and the same problems occurred. I have uninstalled MozyPro from my computer and probably will do so soon on my wife’s computer because MozyPro only backs up about one out of four times it is supposed to. I could not get a response on this problem from MozyPro support by email for several days, so I gave up.
Greetings Mike,
I agree. Mozy just barely works and you have to watch it like a hawk. I with that Apple would make iDisk (MobileMe) more robust. Or that Google would finally come out with Google Disk (or GoogleDisk or GDisk or whatever they plan on calling it). Offsite backup is still not very reliable.
I have, however, had mostly good luck with Connected.com.
Regards,
Erik