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James Shaw

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Mozy or Slowzy?

I've been trying Mozy out as a backup system since last week. Easy to install, although I'm just using the freebie 2gb option for now while I test the service. Turning off huge folders just to get under the 2gb limit was eye-opening for starters, and I basically have very little usefully backed up in 2gb. No email. No images. No music.

But it's a test right, if it works out I'll subscribe and have unlimited space. Cool.

But it's been slow on occasion. To start with I noticed that right-clicking on a few files in Explorer was really slow. No, really slow.

Like, highlight a dozen files, right click and wait 30 seconds for the context menu. That's NOT cool.

I figured out that I can disable that option (which is actually the advice I received from their support when I mentioned it - kinda funny). So right-click is fast again.

Then today I figure I'll do a few more quick tests and plunk down my money for the real deal. I clicked on the Mozy status icon, looked at the history - every 2 hours it's been backing stuff up. Nice.

I click the Restore Files button, just to see how that info is presented. A browser window pops up (odd, we have a windows app installed here guys, why open in a browser?).

That was roughly 30 minutes ago. Maybe 45. it still says "Loading...".

 *Sigh*

Remember, these problems are with a VERY small backup set. Nothing important yet. I have 30gb to backup when I sign up for real. Can you imagine how bad this would be then?

Just for kicks I'm going to keep checking on the computer to see when it finally shows anything interesting...

UPDATE: 7:21am (12 hours later) No change. IE has used 201kb RAM according to Task manager. But no file listing yet.


 

Posted: Wednesday, April 04, 2007 5:40 PM by James
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Comments

Greg said:

The basic Mozy 4GB doesn't support proxy servers :( After a email to support they informed me I would have to go pro to get that functionality... lame... I would have to update without even giving it a trial run for free.
# April 11, 2007 11:17 AM

James said:

I wouldn't bother. I haven't got a reply yet from my latest question about this "restore" problem. Not really much point in a backup you cannot restore...but I'm giving them a week to reply.

# April 11, 2007 2:32 PM

Greg Goodwin said:

I was inspired recently by a post over at James Shaw's blog regarding online file storage product Mozy
# April 12, 2007 8:03 AM

Greg said:

Hey James, I recently tried and fell in love with Box.net's online file storage app. There are some draw backs though, check out my site for the likes and dislikes if you interested.
# April 12, 2007 8:05 AM

British Inside said:

I don't think I've been led astray by Scott Hanselman before, but Mozy was a disaster . Uninstalled.

# April 16, 2007 1:50 PM

ken said:

For me also Mozy completey stopped working after a while for no good reason. When it did work, I had countless interruptions and received some apologetic emails from the company. I'm now trying Beinsync which is based on Amazon storage, which should be much more reliable (also, it has some useful synching and remote access features). If you have a friend join also, you get 2GB for free with BeInSync as well. See http://www.beinsync.com.
# June 3, 2007 6:07 PM

Andrew Page said:

I'm trying Mozy for the $5.00 or so per month plan -- I have about 200gb of photographs I want to back up. So far I've been trying to run the backup day and night and after 2 days I got about 1gb uploaded. At this rate it is going to take me a year to back up everything. I wonder if it will take that long to retreive all my photographs if my hard drives or computers were to crash? I'm getting their average upload rate of 350 Kb/s, but it sure doesn't feel like that. Also I'm having problems keeping an open connection despite hours of troubleshooting (shutting off the standby funciton on my computer, checking my router settings, etc). The time I wasted so far with Mozy I've could have backed up all my files on 25 DVD's.
# June 6, 2007 6:59 AM

Chuck Wood said:

First off, I'd like to apologize for any trouble you have had with Mozy. I've been managing the Support team for Mozy and Mozy Pro since mid-May and am fully committed to making sure that none of these problems occur again. We work very hard to make sure that everyone gets the support they need and can make Mozy work for their needs. If anyone does have trouble, please contact support@mozy.com Thanks, Chuck Wood Mozy Support Lead Engineer
# June 26, 2007 8:06 AM

jon said:

goodness andrew i thought it was just me. i'm pretty much about to cancel at this point, as its been weeks, and don't seem to have anything significant of my gigabytes of of photos backed up. j.
# July 24, 2007 10:28 AM
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