Mozy feedback issues

Update: Mozy responded on October 29th with this:

Hey there,
What I’d like you to do is try a backup in about 48-72 hours. I’ve submitted the account for a cleaning for any bad files. Let me know in about 72 hours if you can run your backups again.

Thanks,
Jamie F.
Mozy Support Team

It’s not really that great of an answer, but I’ll give it a try tomorrow. If it doesn’t work, it’s time to look elsewhere.

Mozy is a service for backing up your data. They’re owned by EMC, so hopes are high that they’re good at what they do (although they didn’t start as an EMC company: They were purchased). I started paying $5 per month for the service a while back because I realized my backup strategy wasn’t very good and for unlimited storage, it seemed pretty enticing.

But Mozy hasn’t backed up any of my data in 163 days — that’s over 5 months. Now, ultimately it’s my fault that I didn’t catch it sooner, but when it comes to backups, I’m paying this company to “set it and forget it.” Not once did Mozy’s icon in the system tray alert me that backups had failed, but they’d silently been failing for a little under half a year, while the company happily charged my credit card every month.

If it’s too hard for developers to pop up a notification bubble that something has gone wrong, I guess it’s also asking a bit much for a backend tool that would shoot off an automated email alerting me as much. But it’d definitely be nice, and wouldn’t make me dislike them so much right now.

I’ve got an email into their customer support box (although I’ve emailed them before about a synchronization issue with their Mac software and never received a reply), so my fingers are crossed. I guess I should start considering my options, though. It seems like they may just suck at what they do.

3 Responses to “Mozy feedback issues”

  1. Jimmy Says:
    October 28th, 2008 at 4:03 pm

    You get what you pay for. mozy is the cheapest solution on the market, and therefore has less features / functionality. You’ve learnt the hard way.

  2. Adam Says:
    October 28th, 2008 at 4:24 pm

    Oh, absolutely. It still doesn’t absolve them, though.

  3. david van brink Says:
    October 29th, 2008 at 2:51 pm

    Heh. I just heard of Mozy and Google found your post. Interesting. In all my years of desktop computing, I’ve never seen a backup that worked. The corporate staff will inevitably discover that the tapes are blank, or the dvd included only the .txt files, or nothing’s been backed up since your IP address changed. Or whatever.

    So your Mozy anecdote is 100% historically consistent!

    I’m gonna give them a try anyway. Thanks for the Gotcha Tip though. :)

    …i wonder if Apple’s "time machine" backup tool works…

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