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 · windows57 Comments
57 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.
we had so many errors with them we were going crazy. we used the proffesional edition, the system would freeze, when it worked it moved slower than my grandmother who died 10 years ago…
we recently changed to onlinebackupvault.com and its been working great..very fast, responsive staff etc…sometimes it pays to use the little guys as they still have the old fashion TLC
[...] long ago I wrote a rather unflattering review of Mozy. I feel bad in a way because I still believe that the concept is good. I haven’t played with the [...]
I was wondering if there were any complaints about Mozy, seems too good to be true! Thanks for the website too, looking to possibly build our next house!
I have to admit that I haven’t tried Mozy at home yet. I have an enormous photo collection. We have had a number of digital photos over the years and I think we now have 300 GB or so of pictures. Mozy is unlimited so it would be cheap offsite storage. My experience was with the business version. I’ll give it a try on my wife’s computer and see how things turn out.
Good luck with the new house. Ironically with the economy down right now is a good time to build for those that can build. For what its worth this is one of my favorite plans:
http://www.theplancollection.com/house-plans/home-plan-3503
Justin,
Don’t be so quick to use the mozy home offering. I used to work for mozy and I will tell you that the home offering sucks. It has a 1 mb speed cap, it has lower priority on restores and it has lower priority with support. They will some times take 6 days to get back to you. Also they do not really care about there customers. They have hired temps who know nothing about computers and tasked them with doing your support.
That’s not even the worst part. The worst is they can and will lose your data. See with there plan for data storage they do lose drives, they will admit that. But they tell you they can recover your files because of there redundancy. The truth is they do not monitor it well enough to do that. If you watch your back from time to time they will reload gigs worth of data. They will tell you it is something called rebasing which happens every 6-10 months. Which is true, they will reload all of your data every 6-10 months. But the rebasing also happens when they lose your data, and it happens a lot more than once every 6-10 months.
Personally I think this is something the customers should know. So that is why I am posting this. One more thing, mozy also has a few well flaws that you can exploit. First is the speed cap with mozy home and the second is the network shares with mozy home. If your interested in that then post back with your email address and I will tell you how to make it work.
Steve.
This is good to know. I haven’t had time to set it up and now I am thinking that I will just avoid it.
That would be your best bet. Mozy really really does try to screw the customer, the profit margin on your storage is huge, and even with the almost 90 percent profit margin they still raised the cost for 6 months to make even more money. Basically they are money grubbers and now get this, they are outsourcing customer support to INDIA. I repeat INDIA. That is the worst move every, they already suck and now they are going to drop to a whole new level of suck. Tell all your friends about how bad mozy is.
I’m no techie, but I am a writer whose whole life is in my computer, so I knew I needed off-site backup and signed up with Mozy. This week my hard drive died, and I discovered that apparently Mozy has not done a full backup of my documents since April. Maybe I’m missing something, but four e-mails to Mozy support have gone unanswered, so I’m about to send my drive off for very expensive data recovery. Can anyone enlighten me? Is there a way to find the files from the last 7 months that don’t seem to be there? Or am I really screwed?
Jill,
I will tell you what mozy is gonna tell you. Go to your web restore and check to see if you can change the date in the right hand corner. If you can change the date and find your data then great if not. Then what more than likely happened is that you were not backing up all of your files even though mozy was saying files backed up successfully. I know that is the dumbest thing you have ever heard, but sadly it is the truth. But if you don’t see any option to restore your data from there site then you will have to send you drive off. Also try sending emails to davidd@mozy.com that will get your questions answered faster, he is the director of support.
Thanks, Steve. Today I finally got on the Live Chat, and sure enough, all the data since April is essentially gone. I’m told there was a problem with the filter (which is on my computer, probably not working right because the hard drive was beginning to fail), and that Mozy tried to send me a warning. But I got no warnings, and the filter issue was supposedly only over the past few weeks, so don’t know what happened since April. I’m told I should have been checking to see what was backing up, and of course that’s right, but it doesn’t make me feel better about Mozy. Live and learn; never trust any automatic backup system to work without being monitored.
Sorry to hear about the lost data Jill. Hopefully a data service can get some of it back.
Jill,
The filter issue that they are telling you about is an issue with the way the software was written and they way it communicates with the anti virus on your system. Basically mozy was written to not work in all situations. But that thing about checking mozy is stupid. Unless mozy gives you an error which I am betting it did not then they are lying to you. They had been having server issues when I left and it is possible they lost your data. But you would need to check your history and see if you were really backing up or if mozy was just sitting on its thumbs. Sorry for the data loss, and I hope a data recovery specialist can help. Another trick is to get a external harddrive case from Staples, take out your drive and plug it into the case (it is super simple and these cases usually have instructions), then plug the external case into your computer via USB. Then sometimes you can get the drive to show up and have all of your data. It does not always work, but it has saved my ass a few times.
Thanks again, Steve. Fortunately I thought to ask the right friend–one who has been working with computers since he sold me my first Kaypro–and he came over and did something like what you describe, but also found that the reason my computer was down was not a bad operating system but a bad memory stick, if that’s what you call it. So the Dell tech support people were wrong too. Sigh. Now I’m backed up to an external hard drive and vowing to stay that way!
Thanks for your help.
One other thought about backup. Try Jungle Disk:
http://www.jungledisk.com/
After mozy failed to work on our server I still needed to figure out a decent solution. I figured Amazon S3 was a good choice, but I didn’t want to write more custom software. Jungle disk took care of the problem for me and made it easy to backup to S3. I don’t work for them. I don’t have any reason to praise them other than their stuff seems to work well and it only costs $20. If you need an offsite backup give them a try.
I just saw the tv add for mozy.com. Immediately I went to their website and when they started to offer free space for every person you recommend and they had to click on a link? I had to googled if they were any complaints. THANK YOU!!!!! I knew it… IT WAS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. I closed their site quicker than RAPIDO!!!!
Hello Justin
My Name is John Galvin and I am the Chief Technical Officer for BackupEarth. I wanted to make a Point that “BackupEarth DO NOT THINK Mozy ARE Sh*t”.
Well done on your Blog, it has generated allot of interest. But I would like to bring it to you and your “true” bloggers attention that allot of comments on this blogs are other Online Backup Companies jumping on the so called down fall of Mozy. And that any blogger reading your blog should think twice about what they are reading when they see links to other Online Backup Companies, and your Bloggers should not this is not Justin’s fault.
This includes us, someone has place a comment about the Pro’s and Con’s of our software, that was not Backup Earth, although the person is a customer of ours and shares a “Good name” he is not related, nor speaks on our behalf. But I will give this comment good credit and request that you do not delete it, as this blogger stated the Pro’s and Con’s and “his” experience with Mozy, I believe he does give a fair comment by showing our faults. Mozy are not perfect, nor are we but at least BackupEarth do not lie too or fool our customers, if anything this comment shows Mozy and BackupEarth are an Honest Companies.
Your blog grabbed my attention when searching Google for our own performance when a link appeared, this link gave the impression that “Mozy Are … And BackupEarth Are Great…” I will not repeat as it will come across incorrect. But I must stress that myself, my staff and BackupEarth do not think like this about Mozy.
We do not post negative blogs about our competitor’s, nor do we jump on the band wagon with false comments to boost our company image over others. I am glad to read that Mozy support did help you out on your issue, and glad to read that your trust in Mozy was being restored.
You may not believe this, but my Uncle worked for EMC for many years and found them to reasonable, well structure and a good place to work. Mozy are one of the Worlds Biggest Online Backup Companies BackupEarth my not be as big as Mozy yet but we are working hard on it.
Mozy got to the size they are but running a well structure company, providing great customer care and at a fair price BackupEarth aim is to match this by providing well structure company, great customer care at a fair price, and someday to beat it.
To all your trusted bloggers, Mozy & BackupEarth will make mistakes, and yes sometimes we cannot provide the customer care or service you required, I apologies in advance. Justin I understand you where very angry at Mozy when you started this Blog, and you have every right to be so.
But we all must give credit to Mozy for trying to solve your issue, they may have failed in your eyes, but they did try. How many of these “other” online companies that have posted here would of come to your aid after your blog had call them sh*t.
Finally well done on your blogs, you can of course contact me direct on email address given. For everyone else please feel free to contact us customercare@backupearth.com or support@mozy.com if there is anything you would like to ask us direct.
Thank you for your time.
Kind Regards
John Galvin
John, I agree with Justin. Mozy is a big rotting pile of SH*T! I have never seen such sh*tware in all my life. The worst spyware in the world is better developed than this crap! Just try, I dare you, try to backup 5GB or more and get it back. Mozy Restore doesn’t even work, which, after all, is the whole point!! Somehow Mozy missed that. This software is SH*TWARE!!!
Hi Jake,
That’s a fair comment; I will not argue with you on that point.
On another point, may I ask you, and this is for all Online Backup Companies, what are you thoughts on the overall customer care of all Online Backup Companies, including ourselves?
Thank you for your reply.
Kind Regards
John
John,
To answer your question, I think all online backup vendors in general are a tough sell. The value proposition is difficult to justify when users can buy 2TB of external HD space for less than $150 these days. Good local backup products are a dime a dozen. However, your software looks to be competitive, particularly where you’ve integrated SQL Server.
Piece of advice though, I recommend opening up the trial to a fully-functioning time-based trial where potential customers can see if the backup/restore actually works. You won’t get too many takers who want to just download the UI if they can’t backup files. Set the certs to expire in 15 days but give the user a chance to experiment with the backup, performance, features, especially recovery.
Whatever you have, it has to be better than Mozy. Boy would I’d like those wasted hours of my life back! I wouldn’t recommend their toxic waste on my worst enemy. That stuff is pure garbage!! Amazes me how companies can put crap like that out on the streets and expect to grow a business.
Hi Jake
Thank You!
I will do exactly as you asked. I will have the Web Boz’s change the website so that users can download the software and get a minimum of 15days free trial if not more. All new trial users will have you to thank for, as it was you who suggested it.
I agreed with your comment “hard sell”, to many Online Companies use fear mongering to sell there products “CAN YOU SURVIVE!!”, “YOUR BUSINESS WILL CLOSE IN 10 DAYS” etc etc.
I didn’t want BackupEarth to fall into this category; I wanted BackupEarth to be viewed as “We are here to help”. And I am hoping this view will sway people away form Local Backup to Online Backup. But you are right it is a very hard sell.
Once again thank you for your reply.
Kind Regards
John Galvin
Hi Jake,
The Web Boz’s have finished what you recommended; you can now download a fully working trial version of the software from http://www.backupearth.com and get 15days free trial.
Thanks for your recommendation,
Kind Regards
John Galvin
John,
I see that and will certainly do! Great job and good luck!
J
I just found this company:
https://www.backblaze.com
Anyone know if they are any good?
Thank you very much for that story. You may have just saved me from the same nightmare. I will just go and buy my own external drive and back it up myself. It sounds like the $99.00 external drive is worth it.
Victoria
Victoria,
An on site external backup will not do you any good if a tornado comes through and blows the building away. A tornado came through a nearby town last summer. That is why I am still researching on line back up systems.
Thanks for all the comments. They have helped me eliminate some programs. KEZ
I finally settled on Carbonite and bought a subscription a couple of months ago. They do NOT back up external drives and their customer support is slow to get back to you (at least it was the one time I emailed them — took 2 days) but it is very simple and feels solid, and I know they are a pretty big company which is reassuring. I hear their ads on the radio all the time. I’m down in the tropics where my Internet is up and down all the time, and I have to say that Carbonite handles these weirdnesses completely transparently. That’s my opinion, anyway. Lynn.
Yeah carbonite is a big company… that is part of the problem. When mozy was a small company I would have used them in a heartbeat. Then EMC bought them and that is went it went to hell. So yeah that is how I saw it work when I worked at mozy.
If Mozy loses the data, as stated above. Do they automatically fix this the next time I do backup by getting the lost stuff again?
Or do I just have to be lucky enough that they ‘rebase’ before I need a restore?
Yes mozy will automatically rebase the data if they lose it on there side. If it becomes corrupt on there side and they do not know it then they will not rebase it…. Or if you have your data get corrupt, and do not know it mozy will backup the corrupted data, and erase your old not corrupted file.
Is there anyway for me - as mozyhome user - to see when rebasing happens?
Or better, can I see when Mozy rebases because of dataloss (regular rebasing is harmless so just checking rebasing is not the most accurate indicator).
Worse is corruption without knowing.
After this story I will rehabilitate HDD-backups.
But even then, when I use a restore from my HDD and the last changes from Mozy, even then I have the risk of overwriting an old version for a more recent but corrupt one.
I am very sorry to hear this all. I really was happy with Mozy: very affordable zero-effort daily backups…
Since I am a Carbonite user, I wrote to them asking about this issue. They told me that they do a periodic checksum to make sure that the version that they have in their backup still matches what’s on the PC. If they find that the backed up version is corrupt, they automatically request it again, though they said even with billions of files backed up, this doesn’t happen very often. They also said that if Carbonite lost the backup comletely, they would re-base like Mozy does, though they stated that this probably will never happen given the reliability of the RAID arrays they use. The user would notice because the backup status indicator would start over at 0%.
Lynn
You can only see when rebasing happens. But if you are rebasing more than once every 6 months. So that is the best way to tell. The best way to see the rebasing is to look at the backup history. When you see a large backup, much larger than usual. Then that is rebasing…. and if it is happening regularly then it is rebasing because of data lose. Mozy is a good product if you know what you are getting. The biggest issue is people think it is bullet proof, when really its kinda like a life vest… it will only save you if you make sure it is kept in good condition.
Ok…. Let me tell you something about carbonites raid. It sucks compared to the way mozy does things. Basically there is about a 13% chance you can lose data with there system. Mozy uses something called DRS (distributed read solomon) look it up… its pretty incredible. But yes they all do that… but they do check to see if it is corrupt on there end… it is not as effect as it could be. I can tell you from experience that they miss stuff all the time.
First of all, it’s spelled “Reed Solomon,” not “read solomon.” And it’s “their”, not “there.” Secondly Reed Solomon error correction is NOT more reliable than RAID6 arrays. Cheaper, perhaps, but not more reliable. If RAID6 could be beat on reliability, the world’s high end data centers would not be running RAID6 arrays, and Dell, HP, EMC, and the others would not be manufacturing them. RAID 6 is simply the gold standard for reliable data storage throughout the IT industry. Reed Solomon, which is used to encode redundancy into CDs so that they tolerate scratches, can probably allow Mozy to squeeze a little more data onto their disks. That was probably a good idea 5 years ago when disks were expensive. As anyone who manufactures storage arrays will tell you, the biggest risks come from software bugs in the storage systems, not hardware failures. In that regard, it makes more sense to stick with high-volume industry standard storage like RAID than a proprietary system developed for internal use only.
I apologize for the spelling errors… I am not an the best at spelling… But I can tell you are about the stupidest person I have ever meet if you think that RAID6 is more reliable than DRS. I know EMC still sells the hardware array… Mozy is an EMC company dumbass… So lets think if RAID6 was better for redundancy don’t you think they would switch… I have personally run tests that prove the fact that DRS.. not just simply Reed Solomon. DRS is the same principal.. but much safer… If a file is broken down into 12 fragments 9 Unique 3 redunant, every fragment on a different drive…. Plus there is a software auditor that checks for corruption in any of the fragments…. Mozy would have to lose 33% of there drives before they lose your data. Carbonite and there RAID 6 would only have to lose 19% and those are proven facts.
So lets think about this is 19% greater than 33% no… so if you have any brains in your head at all you will be able to understand that. Why don’t you read the thesis paper by co-authored by Josh Coates at Berkeley. That would give you a better understanding of the process, and the application of it. You are right… software is the greater cause of data lose than hardware failure. I was simply just attempting to explain to the readers of this blog that Mozy is more reliable than Carbonite. I personally think they both suck…. Online data backup is not as good a deal as these companies want you to think. I worked at Mozy for more than a year and did upper level support, I understand what you are trying to say, but your simply just wrong. DRS is not a better way to have redundancy if your a large business,… But they way there master data storage OS is written it is much better form of redundancy.
Hmm, if Mozy can afford to lose over 30% of it’s data, I would expect that rebasing because of data loss should not happen too often. (See mesage of Steve on october 20th). That message insinuates that it is something to worry about.
What are they doing for heaven’s sake. Losing more than one third of their disks???
They are losing alot of disks… and the software is just not realizing that data is gone….. see it is a catch 22. It is a great software on there backend… but it also has its problems. Basically what it comes down to the fact that rebasing is an issue. But Data lose with out rebasing is not a big issue. See if mozy loses something.. they rebase it. or if it is corrupt they rebase it. So they try to fix the problems they have… but if you lose your data before the rebase then it is gone.
This is exactly my point: “Software isn’t realizing that the data is gone.” It’s not disk failures per se that are cauing customers to lose data — it’s defects in the software. This is highly complex stuff, and it’s the bugs that kill you, not hardware failures.
RAID, Reed Solomon, whatever algoritm you use to spread your data redundantly across multiple disks, should in theory almost completely eliminate the possibility of losing data due to disk failures. Think about a standard 16-drive RAID6 array: in order to permanently lose data, you have to lose 3 of the 16 drives almost simultaneously. if you lose one, drive, no problem. You just plug in a new one and in about an hour it has rebuilt itself. Lose 2, same thing. Now what are the chances of losing 2 drives within an hour of each other? If you take a disk failure rate of 3% a year (that’s what Google experiences), the chances of a drive filing in any given hour of the year is 1 in 8,760. If there are 16 drives, the chances of any drive failing in a given hour are about one in 547. The chance of 3 drives failing in the same hour are approximately 547 cubed, or one in 164 million, or once every 18,700 years. In short, if you are awake and replace dead drives promptly, you should almost never lose data due to disk failures. That’s why almost all commercial data centers use RAID. And probably why Carbonite uses RAID. How much can you gain by writing your own proprietary equivalent of RAID? And then you’re stuck with the bugs.
Almost all the catestrophic problems with large data storage systems stem from software problems, not dead disks. That’s why Mozy loses data — I can almost guarantee it. When you have commercial systems like RAID6 that are used in thousands of data centers around the world, have had thousands of developers working to perfect it over 25 years or more, why would you risk your business by “rolling your own?” It would be like writing your own relational database because you didn’t like some aspect of Oracle.
I do not disagree with what your saying… but think of this… mozy’s profit margin on a pro account just a regular pro account is 95%, because of the DRS…. If you use RAID6 it goes down to 45%, and that is charging 3.95 per license, and .50 per GB.
The best thing about the implementation of DRS is the ability to lose much more than just 3 disks at one time in one hour… I understand that will almost never happen, but there is a possibility. For example when I worked at mozy we had one of our Datacenters overheat. The cooling system went down, and then Center manager failed to realize that. So we lost about 22% of our drives, and no one could get there data for about 9 hours. It go so hot in there a cisco switch, before it died, Registered a temp of above 300 degrees. Now I don’t know about you but I have never heard of those things being able to operate at temps that high with no cooling. So anyway they lost no data in that event. It was all saveable. The servers did not shut down properly. We lost ton’s of disks, but we still had all the data. So that is why DRS is a better move than RAID6. Because of problems like that. Also RAID6 my be the trusted gold standard, but I would feel much safer with DRS.
Here is the root of the software problem… It is written in python, and does not do all the things mozy wanted it to do. So they attempted to rewrite it in C. Well that was the trouble, they did not do it right. They failed to deploy a client that would properly communicate with C Triton (Triton is the name of the Backend OS) So the client and there server were having ton’s of errors. Also the programing was flawed. They put hard limits of file name length. Which is stupid in the first place. So mozy’s real problem was EMC buying them, and them not caring how things go. They could have there product up and running… and working better than ever, if they took the time to test it, and write it properly. As it stands now, they usually spend about a week of hard writing and testing, then they ship it out. Mozy’s biggest problem is well laziness.