Mozy Backup Review

Unfortunately, I can not trust Mozy with my backups.

Here's why:

Thank you for your patience while we escalated your issue and gathered more information on your backups. I got back a database of information about your communication with the mozy servers during your backups. We've selected points of interest that should show problems that your backups had been experiencing.

You'll see in the database that the size of your files selected changed during the history of backups:
   97,027,146 --- 97 MB
10,334,151,774 --- 10 GB
50,602,227,408 --- 50 GB
83,901,080,437 --- 83 GB

You'll notice that a large majority of your backups have Connection errors. This would mean that during your backup there was no network or limited connectivity, but network interfaces found. Your backup also run into issues where the connection was lost or shut down while Mozy was sending data.

Mostly important, we found the errors ServerError12 and ServerError3. You can read about these errors in this document below

https://mozy.secure.force.com/support/mozyKnowledgeWidget?DocId=78663

ServerError12 can typically be caused by one of two issues:

1.  The sync was interrupted by an internet connection error.
This type of issue is temporary, so running the backup again should be successful.

2.  The client-side manifest is locked by another program.
This can often be resolved by rebooting the computer.  However even a reboot may not resolve some of the damage done to the file.  In such a case, it is recommended that you rename the manifest to force Mozy to resync.

The manifest is a list of files that your computer wants to backup. It is possible that your manifest was corrupted during transfer because of all the connection errors.

If you look at the site http://mozy.com/home/download you'll see that our newest version of Mozy for Mac 2.2.1 has fixed several issues that you personally were effected by in the past. I suggest you upgrade from your 2.1 version to the 2.2.1.

We fixed an issue where the client would have trouble connecting due to a timeout period not having elapsed. We fixed several instances(including your instance of ServerError3) that sometimes resulted in where selected files could become deselected due to a bad manifest.

I replied with:

It's ok if such problems in the software have been fixed, although a client email should have been sent out alerting us that their has been a problem and what we should check to ensure file integrity and backup. 

But it's still not ok if the backups I have done have been permanently lost. Can you retrieve the gigs of data that your records now show were backed up? 

Unfortunately, when I tried to go back to get your oldest set of files. I am unable to go back far enough to grab your gigabytes of data. It has now been deleted from the servers. After 30 days if a file is no longer selected on the current backup then it is marked for deletion on our servers.

This has now taken a turn for the worse as my laptop was covered by water in a flood. So now I need the mozy backup that I have made. This contains my life work, photos, everything.

How can it be retraced and recovered from the harddrives that you use to store the backups?

This is now beyond just inconvenient as unless Apple can recover the harddrive content which they are now looking at, mozy is the only place that contains my data on disk.

I'm very sorry to hear about your loss, however there is no way to go back to anything older that has already been deleted.  Once it has been deleted as per the 30 day policy it is not retrievable in any way.  You can get anything that is still currently backed up though, through any of our restore methods.

Suffice it to say when you choose a backup service, the point is that you need to be confident they will backup your stuff, right?

Well I can no longer trust the management or dev team of mozy backup.