Aral Balkan

I've been a paid-up subscriber of the much-hyped Mozy remote backup system for about a year now. The only problem is that I haven't really used it in that time and I emailed them a few days ago to ask them to cancel my account (and I haven't heard back yet). The reason: I haven't successfully backed up once on my Mac.

When you first run Mozy, you select the folders you want to back up and Mozy starts backing them up. This first backup can take a long time if you have lots of files. We're talking days here.

That's fine except there's a catch: You can't interrupt the backup.

Update: Keith Peters reports that you can actually interrupt the backup and provides a screen-grab to prove it. That being the case, this must be one of the worst UI cock-ups in history because, for all intents and purposes, it looks to the user as if the backup failed and is starting over.

If you're on a desktop machine that you leave on all the time, that shouldn't be an issue. But my primary machine is my notebook and I'm rarely in the same spot for a couple of hours let alone a couple of days.

So Mozy has never backed up my Mac successfully.

Every now and then I see the error dialog above to remind me that I'm paying for something that I'm not using.

This is such a fundamental flaw that I don't know how Mozy gets the glowing reviews that it does. Perhaps most of the reviewers use it to back up just two or three files for testing and leave it at that.

I might give Mozy another try at some point if they implement a system where you can actually resume interrupted backups.(And if anyone from Mozy is reading this, could you please get back to me about canceling my account?)

Update: After Keith's advice, I let the Mozy app run its course and it has finally managed its first successful backup. I'm going to give it another chance. But please, guys, fix that horribly misleading UI!

Comments

• Hey guys! This looks like a great service (except for the UI then, Aral ;-)). But am I right if I understand that in fact you are rsyncin' your data over SSL to a remote server? In that case, this service is impossible to use if you live in Belgium (like I do). All ISP's in Belgium seriously limit the monthly allowed data traffic for their subscribers. I myself am a subscriber of edpnet.be, a company with the second-to-largest allowed traffic available in this country, and still my allowed monthly bandwidth is only 60GB. That means it is impossible for me to start the initial backup, at least if I don't want to wait 2 months for it. That's a shame, would love to see the EU do something about that.

  by Sven Dens on 2008-01-28 15:41:37

• Mozy is sloooow and I agree that not being able to interrupt a back-up is simply a bad application design. I've been using Mozy to back up my digital photo's for almost a year now and it does seem to work ok with that. My backups are for 84,533 files, 22.9 GB. You didn't say how much you were trying to back up. I wouldn't dare to try and back up my whole computer with Mozy for the same reasons you outlined.

  by Earl on 2008-01-25 12:52:56

• In theory I'd recommend you use Carbonite instead. Just like Mozy, you tell it a bunch of stuff to back up and the first time around this takes ages. Carbonite has the huge advantage that it can be interrupted too. When the machine comes back on and reconnects to the internet, it carries on backing up as if nothing had happened. The huge massive show-stopper downside though is that they are taking forever and a day to release a Mac client. Mac users can sign up to be notified when the beta program starts though: http://www.carbonite.com/CustomerSupport/ViewPost.aspx?postid=149 (try to contain your excitement folks!)

  by David Arno on 2008-01-25 12:13:54

• You can definitely interrupt backups. I have over 70 GB worth of photos, music, movies, other files. Yeah, the first backup took forever. Over a week. But it got interrupted many, many times. It may be a UI flaw. It looks like it's starting over. But if you dig in, you'll see really is continuing where it left off. It does eventually finish.

  by Keith Peters on 2008-01-25 13:00:25

• OK, not quite 70 GB, but almost, and took a couple of weeks, but here you can see it got interrupted dozens of times, and finally finished. http://www.bit-101.com/misc/mozy.png

  by Keith Peters on 2008-01-25 13:08:19

• Hi Keith, Thanks! That's a horrible UI flaw. Hmm, I might look into using it then but they really need to change that interaction. It does look like it's starting over.

  by Aral on 2008-01-25 13:13:18

• I think you'd be much happier with Jungledisk, I dropped Mozy a long time ago. The 15GB of data I have backed up currently cost me $4/month. Jungledisk also mounts itself as a network drive so you can back up to it using any tool (Superduper?) you like, although the Jungledisk client works fine for me. I also use it to back up my two webservers.

  by Stefan on 2008-01-25 15:39:31