Yes you read that right. I used to love this company. The concept is great - backup your data online for dirt cheap. Install the software and away you go. They backup everything and even encrypt your data for security. You get cheap backups and they get a little bit of money. I thought this was the total bomb so I installed in on my server. My live server. My live Windows server. I am such a moron.
The first problem I ran into was a full temp directory on my main drive. Windows servers don't like that at all so I get in touch with their tech support and they tell me to change my environment variables and point the temp drive somewhere else. I figure that is an OK solution so I point the temp folder to a dedicated drive with 20 Gigs of free space. A few days later I start getting warnings that the disk is low on space. "That is odd," I think, but I am busy and kind of lazy and I will get to it later. Why worry? My data is backed up.
I deploy a new copy of my website (ThePlanCollection.com) with all kinds of new features. Luckily it is 1 am so the only one surfing the site are hackers in Czechoslovakia. The site dies and gives all kinds of strange errors. I stare at the errors for a minute and then realize that the .Net framework can't do its just in time compiling thing.
What could possibly cause that?
I look at my dedicated 20Gig temp directory. Mozy HAS FILLED THE ENTIRE THING WITH TEMP CRAP. All I can figure is that they make backups cheap by using your drive to backup somebody else's stuff. For a few moments I imagine my server's hard drive filling up with some kid's porn. Why on earth do I need 20Gig of space on my drive to backup 20 Gig worth of stuff? If I wanted to use 20Gig of my own space I could just save the money and backup my stuff to my own damn drive.
Who the hell wrote this code?
What's worse is that you can't just delete some of the junk in your temp directory. You have to uninstall their software then reboot - yes reboot your live server.
Once the scourge know as Mozy was off my box everything worked fine. My website came right up.
Thank you Mozy for taking down my server.
Tags: backup software · mozy · servers · windows18 Comments
18 responses so far ↓
HEY! I edited the title and changed it to crap! Why do you have to be so difficult!
Justin,
A couple things… First off, I haven’t experienced this problem first hand (as a Mozy user) but have a friend who has seen this issue with his account. He said it was annoying but that a simple reboot would clear the temp files.
That brings me to my next point… Did you use the “home” version of the software for your server? That’s what it sounds like. They have a separate enterprise edition that is better designed for servers.
And two other things… Not to rub it in too much, but installing backup software on a live server that you never want offline or rebooted? I would NEVER do that. Unless, of course, it’s the only server I have (which is a problem in and off itself… anyone who runs “always on” websites + everything else on their network via one server is asking for it).
But assuming you have more than one server and don’t have a single point of failure waiting to explode, I’d install the backup software somewhere else and backup your web server via the network. Also, what kind of computer do you have that you don’t have 20 gigs free on your C drive only to have only 20 gigs free on your next alternative location? Hard drive space is cheaper than it’s ever been. I’m surprised you wouldn’t be worried already if 20 gigs is the best you had in terms of free space…
Bottom line: Mozy should fix this issue. But your handling of the situation was a perfect storm of sorts than magnified the problem substantially. And Mozy’s not to blame for that.
First I shouldn’t have to reboot to clear the temp files. Mozy should have a throttle control that let’s you set how much space it is allowed to use. I use the enterprise version of this software and talked at length with their sales people before choosing this solution. They told me it was built to be run on a server and in fact was a great solution for backing up my sql database.
Since they are advertising it as a server solution why should I not expect minimal downtime? I can handle an occasional reboot but why should my backup software be the reason my site goes down? Also, if I want to create a system where I backup my file off line to another server then why use Mozy at all? The reason I chose this software was so that I didn’t have to go setup another system to do just that. They advertise this software as a simple solution to prevent me from having to do something custom.
Last this is a $5000 server with 6 SCSI hard drives in a redundant configuration with an online hot spare, multiple processors, redundant power supplies etc. I have a spare 20GB in a partition dedicated to Mozy so that it doesn’t interfere with the main system drive. We have spent quite a bit of money on network and firewall infrastructure to prevent downtime. A piece of $5 a month software just became our weakest link.
Mozy has responded to the problem so I give them credit for that. For the money you can’t beat it. (We were looking at another solution that would have cost hundreds of dollars per month, but given us the same service). The fix requires a registry edit which I am not thrilled about.
Just a few changes would make this software 100% better and ready for use in a server environment:
1. Make it clear that the software is going to use a LOT of space to perform backups.
2. Add a setting that let’s you set Mozy’s temp directory to something other than the system’s temp directory.
3. Add a setting that let’s you throttle the amount of temp space Mozy can use. Even if this slowed down the backup it would make managing the system simpler and let the system administrator maintain control over his environment.
Your points are well taken. One minor quibble: I wasn’t actually suggesting that you back up your files off line… Just that you run Mozy on another computer (not on a live web server) that backs up whatever network drives you pick. It would still be an online backup of your files.
That’s actually a really good idea. Backing up the files that way takes the load of the main server and gives us another backup in the process. The problem is getting around to setting it up. We used to run a backup that pulled files from the live server to a secure server in our office. I might try to get around to that again someday. In the mean time I am going to try a couple of fixes from Mozy. I really do like the service and I hope that it becomes more robust. I would also like to see them move onto LInux which is a large portion of the server market.
I was a huge fan of Mozy before this nasty little encounter and spread Mozy love all around. If they fix the problems I will go back to being a big fan and evangelist.
I’m part of the tech ops team at Mozy, and I assure you we’re not storing other people’s stuff on your box. I spend a lot of time ensuring we have enough petabytes to keep it all.
We use some pretty cool tech to store massive amounts of data, enabling very low cost per GB and the ability to tolerate lots of disk failure.
The client needs space to prepare the encrypted copy. It does this in parallel with the upload once the initial pieces are ready. Do you have some huge disk images, database, whatnot? 20GB of locked files doesn’t sound right though.
I am not intimately familiar with the client internals, however. I’ll bring this up with the coders on Monday. Please feel free to contact me: kevin@mozy.com.
Hey Kevin,
Thanks for the response. My love for Mozy is coming back. If we can get all these problems fixed I’ll become an evangelist once more. We are mainly backing up images - thousands of them in the 100-600k range. We do backup a database that is 1GB in size and I wonder if that is causing issues. The temp drive shows a lot of 600MB files being generated several times a day.
I know you don’t backup other people’s stuff to my drive. I wasn’t serious about that. Tech support sent me a registry hack that should help somewhat. However, I am still hoping for a supported way of configuring Mozy’s temp drive and a way to either control how much temp space it is allowed to use or a way to get a report of how much it thinks it will use. When dealing with servers it is important to be able to control these variables so that you don’t have a non working site at 1am that sends you into cardiac arrest.
Thanks
I’ve just had a similar problem - not on a live server, but on my desktop PC. I actually turned off Mozy a couple of weeks ago when i needed to free up the space and only remembered to turn it back on yesterday. Sure enough by this afternoon my C drive is full - I knew where to look and sure enough all the Mozy temp files are back. I found the registry hack on Mozy’s site (http://mozy.com/support/supportfaq) but 1. this shouldn’t happen in the first place, and 2, if it must surely it should be configurable by the user without going into the registry.
It shouldn’t be necessary to have big temp files like that. When we designed Carbonite, we decided to encrypt files on the fly as they are being backed up. If they are really big files, it breaks them up into small chunks and encrypts and transmits the chunks one at a time, keeping the chunks in memory. The encryption process always stays one chunk ahead of the transmission process so that transmission is continuous. The chunks are encrypted again using the SSL protocol. I’m not sure why you would design the system to do everything in batch mode with a big temp file. We certainly don’t do it that way. I was surprised to learn this. Thanks.
David Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
Carbonite.com’s Backup Software is Shit - too!
Don’t let David Friend pull wool over your eyes. His software bites big time.
Why? His software doesn’t backup all the files in your directories - even after you select to. In other words, Carbonite’s backup process skips many file types, and the BEST part is… that they conveniently fail to mention this to you.
They skip important file types like: (cab, chm, com, dll, exe, hlp, inf, iso, jar, msi) - just to mention a few!
See a larger list at: http://www.tomkirkham.com/node/109
He will claim that these file types are not important, but that’s hog-wash!
He will say that they are part of the Windows OS, but I have an “D:\Software” directory that contains many of these files types that don’t get backed-up at all - thanks Mr. Friend.
He will claim that you can override and choose to backup these files types.
He’s technically right, but this is how you gotta do it.
* First, you gotta know which ones he excludes
* Then you gotta go hunt-down and find them
* Third, you gotta right-click on every stinking file type.
* Sorry, but I haven’t got the time - there are too many other competitors in the marketplace.
You see it’s pretty simple, he fools thousands of people to give him money ($$$) thinking that their hard drive is completely backed-up. NOT! And by doing so he saves plenty of dollars on his Data Center and bandwidth costs while getting rich off the generally uninformed public.
Two sayings come to mind, “There’s a sucker born everyday” and “Caveat Emptor”.
Congratulations Mr. Friend, but you’re no friend of mine!
It’s not a good idea to back up .exe, .dll, .com, and many other file types by default. If a user restores these files to a new machine, they are very likely to screw up their new computer. We learned this the hard way because we used to include all these file types in our default and the customer support phone was ringing off the hook. If you want to back up executables because you are a programmer, it is easy to do in Carbonite.
I don’t think there is any backup services that literally back up “everything on your computer” by default. It certainly wouldn’t be a good idea and would mislead users into believing that they could get everything back, including their applications. Windows just doesn’t work that way. If we backed up all the file types that you mentioned by default, we would have a huge number of angry and disappointed customers. If what you really want is a bare metal restore, you should consider running a specialized product like Acronis and then backing up the big file that it creates. I know that some of our technically sophisticated customers do this. It will at least give you a shot at restoring applications in a working state.
All online backup software is shit. Mozy. IDrive. Haven’t tried Carbonite but I’ve heard so many rotten things about it I’m quite sure it’s safe to assume that it is shit, too. These worthless, poorly-coded, time-wasting BS programs all follow the same patterns:
-You install them on your PC and they cripple performance.
-Backup/configuration interface is buggy, unstable and slooooooooooooow. Mozy, for some idiotic reason, insisted on searching my entire hard drive when I started it up, looking for files it wanted to back up. The result? I had to go to bed and get up seven hours later to see if Mozy had finally taken its sweet time to load up and offer me some options to actually, you know, USE the damned thing.
-Backups don’t run reliably, if at all. Takes days to upload your files due to poor upload limitations.
-Worse, backups claim to run OK, but you attempt to restore files and have to wade through a lot of counter-intuitive nonsense and jump through various hoops, then maybe they’ll send you the files within, oh, 2-3 days. If they remember.
-Invariably you start getting asinine error messages claiming you’ve exceeded your quote despite the fact you’re nowhere near your limitations.
-Uninstall process results in whiny “Why are you abandoning us??! Fill out this online survey now” prompts and the junk software isn’t removed properly from your computer, forcing you to comb through the registry and program folders to flush all traces of it.
-You wind up cobbling together a homebrew solution involving sending a .zip file of your stuff via FTP to some server, or just buying a large USB key to hold all your data, synchronizing files to it and then taking it into work to sync up on your work PC for easy off-site storage. That’s what I did - no more of these stupid online backup programs are going to infest my computer, feeding off RAM and consuming way too many CPU cycles.
Makers of online backup software: get it through your heads. If you release buggy, glacially-slow trash that wastes potential customers’ time having to install, test and remove your crud, you’re not going to be doing your organization any favors. Repeat after me: backup software should be fast, intuitive, and reliable.
Backup software should be fast, intuitive, and reliable.
Backup software should be fast, intuitive, and reliable.
Backup software should be fast, intuitive, and reliable.
Everyone on board?
Currently, I am reviewing a product called Crash Plan.
Apparently, it was originally written by software developers to solve their own backup needs.
I like it for these reasons:
* It stores all the versions (as they change) of your files - the others don’t.
* It allows you multiple backups locations (local/off-site) - the others don’t.
* Typically all off-site backups will be slower than locals - but do both!
* It wasn’t dreamed-up by a business man - the others were.
It’s not perfect but IMHO it’s better than Mozy or Carbonite!
Has anybody else reviewed this product…
Or is anybody else listening?
PS - There video fails to mention that backups residing on “friend” machines are encrypted.
Hi All
I have read through all your comments and agreed with them, especially with Justin. We used to use Mozy and it broke my heart, everything Jusin said happened to us aswell. But the amazing thing was I only wanted to backup 5 to 6Gbs of data but yet my Temp drive was showing 25 to 30Gb.
I don’t believe Mozy when they told me that they are “not storing” other peoples information on other users computers. There is no way that 5Gb could jump to 25Gb within a few days. Restarting a server is madness, plus as we all know there is a good chance it won’t come back on again. We through out Mozy and got Carboine… NEVER AGAIN, it took hours to scan the hard-drive and when I tried to stop it I kept getting an error. In the end I just had to leave it do its thing.
The worse about all this is I already knew which files and folders I wanted to backup. I understand that Backing Up Windows Folder is waste of time as it cannot be restored with having to reinstall, so I did like that part of the system. But there are many other software (.exe, dll) etc that we still need backing up and I had to spend hours right clicking etc.
Finally Carboine used up to much resources so I had to give that the boot. After trying one or two others I was going to give up and just go back to tapes. Until I found http://www.backupearth.com
The BackupEarth software us very good, it is a very big program all right but there are plans to bring out smaller versions of it. You can:
Pro’s:
1: Backup Any Files and Folders
2: AutoZip Folders to a Zip and then backup (Very Handy when dealing with tills like I do)
3: It uses an Explorer Style Viewer to find the folders & files you want to backup
4: Everything is done is Tabs so you can hide the options you don’t want
5: Backups SQL and Restores SQL
6: You can connect any scanner to it and scan documents of which are then backed up
7: You have a Recycle bin should you “accidentally” delete a file from your backup
8: The software backups up in Blocks of 10 Files at time (No Temp Storage Required and less Bandwidth)
9: You can transfer large files up to 1Gb and more (Depends on how much you are willing to pay) to the http://www.backupearth.com website and people can login and download the files. Very handy when your Email Provider won’t allow to send attachments over 5Mb for example.
10: You can backup the windows folder but it will give you a warning that you may not be able to restore etc.
11: Your data is held in secure, bomb proof, end of the world facilities and they can prove it because they are regulated by the Data Protection Commissionaire EU (Government Regulated Company US)
12: Very Easy to restore information, the Restore Tab has a Explorer, open a folder and it will show which files are missing, which are backed up etc etc just tick the files or folder and click restore now
13: Reports gives reports on a daily bases of what’s been backed up etc plus email them to you
14: Error control, if any error occurs on the software they know about it before you do. The software connects to their server with the error and if it is serious they will ring you to solve it. I had first hand experience.
Cons:
1: The software is very large, but you can hide the tabs easily e.g. If you don’t use SQL or Scanned Documents just click view and hide Tab Sql etc
2: The software takes a little time to get use to, mainly due to all the options. But they do have help videos online to talk to you how thing done.
3: The software uses between 50 – 70Mbs to load up, but they do tell you about this.
4: The software can be slow when clicking through the Explorer at times, they are working on this it something to do with how it searches it database.
5: Only Windows Version Available. MAC, Unix etc are on the way
6: You can download the demo and it is fully working but you can backup files to their servers.
7: The Demo has fewer options than the full version to try out; they said this was done so those who paid for the software get more. (DEMO No Reports for example)
Regards
John
http://www.rebelbargroup.com
I stopped reading after this comment:
“I look at my dedicated 20Gig temp directory. Mozy HAS FILLED THE ENTIRE THING WITH TEMP CRAP. All I can figure is that they make backups cheap by using your drive to backup somebody else’s stuff.”
You lost all credibility after that. I mean, surely you can’t be serious?
Mozy has some flaws but when compared to other offerings (pro/con list it against others if you want) it easily comes out on top. My main concern is, how unlimited is “unlimited”? Some folks are backing up near terabits of data when them and havent hit that problem yet.
Here’s some help for those that can’t tell rant/humor from fact:
I look at my dedicated 20Gig temp directory. Mozy HAS FILLED THE ENTIRE THING WITH TEMP CRAP. <- This is true
All I can figure is that they make backups cheap by using your drive to backup somebody else’s stuff. <- This is a joke/humor/not serious, just an expression of my bewilderment at how lousy their software is at using temp space. No one is asserting they are actually doing this. This type of action would be cause for lawsuits thus it is a JOKE.
The fact is that the software still fails for the task I specified. I am still out all the money I paid upfront to get ’simple’ backups and I don’t dare turn this on again for fear that it will take my machine down just like it did the previous 3 or 4 times I tried it.
To be honest you get what you pay for.
Mozy / Carbonite are cheap and designed for the masses of consumers. If you have a live production server that is mission critical that needs protecting very frequently (like every 15mins) then you should be looking to spend a bit more money on a service that fits your needs than a consumer focused offering from Mozy who are trying to sell it to the enterprise market it wasn’t designed for.
Iron Mountain’s LiveVault is a great service, a little more costly, but can also provide disaster recovery and full system (yes including System State and exe’s etc) backup and recovery, as well as DeltaRestore to recover corrupt / damaged files lightening fast.
I agree with you Jimmy. You do have to pay more. My original complaint was that Mozy advertised that they would work on live production servers. I called them asked if I could run their ‘Pro’ version to backup my live server and they told me yes. I didn’t just install it one day to try it out. I did research ahead of time. I actually was very thrilled with the Mozy service at first. If they fix the bugs I will be thrilled to use them in the future. In the mean time I will try to find some time to look at Carbonite and LiveVault. I think there is an incredible market here for a company that can provide enterprise quality backups at an affordable price.