The People Have Decided: "Mozy Sucks"

...just got burned by mozy..and a quick check reveals i'm know the only one...so in the hopes that i might help someone avoid trouble, or someone make trouble by launching an effort to make mozy either live up to its promises or share the burden of the disasters it caused...here's the web consensus..on mozy (they suck)

Mozy Sucks 1:
Rant: Dear Mozy, you suck.


Mozy is a company who offers a service that allows you to back up your computer to their datacenter. Prior to March 1st, 2011 the service was advertised as "unlimited" with a fixed cost of $4.95 a month.

Mozy has now eliminated the unlimited plan with a new plan.

I'm using 1.1 TB. What has previously cost me $55 a year will now cost me ~$1,200 a year. That's a 2,222% increase in cost.





Their blog entry by their president Harel Kodesh makes it sound as if they're surprised that people are backing up so much. If that's true, then Mozy's in big trouble because anyone who provides an online service should realize that today's heavy users are tomorrow's normal users.

If I go out and invest in buying HD movies from iTunes I need to back them up because if I lose my hard drive or my house burns down, my investment is gone. Same with my music. Photos are irreplaceable. As more of your belongings move from physical things to 1's and 0's, you have to house them somewhere.

Why the sudden cost increase? CNet reports:

"There has been a change in consumer behavior," said Russ Stockdale, Mozy's vice president of product management. "What we have seen since we launched an unlimited service five years ago is there has been an explosion in digital content, specifically digital photos and video."

Well duh.


"The cost of storage is an element, but it is not even the majority of cost of providing the service," Stockdale said. "The bandwidth, the data centers, the people who manage that--those costs are a larger part of the cost of providing this."


It's worth noting that competitors like BackBlaze, Carbonite, and Crashplan have the same overhead and they've all reiterated they're not changing their pricing.


Mozy, though a subsidiary of storage powerhouse EMC, uses its own software running on commodity storage systems. Later this year, though, to it'll start moving users to EMC hardware and eventually migrate everyone, Stockdale said.



They raise my costs by over 2200% and my data's not even on EMC hardware? Okay now the price gouge moved from obscenely high to flat-out robbery.

Ten years ago this month, I was set to renew my auto insurance with Geico. My then-girlfriend (now wife) had wrecked my brand new Toyota Tundra and was partially at-fault in the accident. Geico refused to insure me with her on my insurance. The damage was 10% of the vehicle's worth ... not a great accident but she didn't total the vehicle. I argued with them that she wasn't uninsurable and everything had a price and that if they wished to keep me as a customer, my girlfriend would have to be allowed to drive my vehicle. The agent talked to the underwriters and they gave me a price of $2,000 every six months for some modest amount of coverage. I laughed and reminded them that there were plenty of other insurance companies that would only charge a fraction of that. I had been a customer for four years with no claims except for that one. I asked them if one accident was enough to make them them dismiss me as customer. They wouldn't budge. I went to Progressive for a fraction of the cost with more coverage and this year marks the tenth year I've been with them. No issues and their service has been superior to Geico in every way. I'll never understand why Geico never valued my loyalty but Progressive has sure appreciated it.

This scenario is apparently going to repeat itself with Mozy playing the role of Geico. Here's hoping Carbonite, Crashplan, or BackBlaze will be my new Progressive.

http://soveryuncool.com/?tag=mozysucks

Mozy Sucks 2: 
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 08, 2009

Mozy Sucks


I have once again been taught that powerful and annoying lesson that you get what you pay for.

I have a LOT of data on my computer--years of design work and graphics. Almost 200GB of it.

And I'm religious about backups, because I don't want to lose any of it. I used to use disks (so archaic I don't even have drives that will read them anymore!), tapes (awful, no drivers for old readers), CDs (don't hold much), DVDs (hold more but still not that much), Flash drives (hold more, fast, but not good long-term)...

And then I discovered online backup. I actually reviewed them for cnet.com. At first the idea of backing up my private data over the web to some server somewhere didn't feel right.

Then, as the systems used heavy encryption, it felt fine--and also made me feel better to know my backups were off-site, sometimes duplicated at two sites, sometimes inside one of the James Bond mountains.

Connection Online Backup, which is housed in one of those high-security mountains, was what I used on my Windows PC for years. It was fast, smart (only backing up changes), reliable, and reasonable--about $15 a month for 10GB. But 10GB just wasn't enough and as I needed more space, the cost became prohibitive.

I tried Mozy for Windows but it was brutally slow, took over my computer and made everything else virtually stop, so I uninstalled it.

When I moved to the Mac, I started using software calledJungleDisk that uses Amazon's S3 server systems to store your encrypted data. Amazon has a huge infrastructure and smartly decided to start renting out disk space and other features and I felt like they'd have great reliability. The JungleDisk software is well designed, easy to use, also only backs up changes, runs really fast (even my first backup of over 100GB took only about a week), and you can access your backed up files through the Finder as if they were on a normal drive--as well as accessing them remotely through a web site if you so choose.

Amazon's backup rates are quite reasonable (15¢ per gigabyte), so my monthly fee was $15. Jungledisk the software itself was free--though you could buy it for $10 to get support, which I did because it's good and well worth it.

Despite this, I was lured to once again try Mozy because it advertised "unlimited backup for $4.95" - Saving $10 a month sounded good, so I installed Mozy...

That was six months ago. It took over five months to back up my data.

Let me say that again--it took over five months to back up my data.

As I said, I have a lot of data, but even so, five months? OK, so that's only $25, but it's five months during which time if I wasn't also using JungleDisk I wouldn't have a real backup.

And then it started to get fun--because once it finally backed up everything, it stopped backing up new things. It tried, but it always gave me a "connectionerror1." Support would tell me "you need the new version" and I'd download and install the new version and I'd get the same error message.

This has gone on for over a month. One day it was magically again able to backup, but that was a fluke, it stopped again. I've been emailing back and forth to support, almost daily, for over a month--six weeks, really. They're very nice but they never solve the problem.

I exported a 75MB log file for them to view. They did, and then they told me to downgrade to a previous version (when I had the previous version they told me to upgrade to the newer one). They explained this probably wouldn't work but they wanted to see the log file.

I'll be generous and say it must work for somebody--maybe people with very few files. Maybe their mistake is selling it for "unlimited" backup when it's really only good at about 2GB which you can get for free. But if you don't have many files, then get the free version and leave it at that.

It finally came to a head when I wanted to back up a file. I'd saved a newer file over an older one by mistake. OK, no big deal, that's why I backup. So I went to restore, I waited several hours--oh, that's right, let me repeat it, I WAITED SEVERAL HOURS FOR THE RESTORE TO LOAD, AND THEN IT FAILED. Others report waiting over two weeks for their files to be ready to restore--and that's when the software did work. That's unacceptable.

So--Mozy, the backup system, won't backup, and perhaps even worse, it won't restore.

That, my friends, is not a value even at $5 a month. That is, in fact, a total waste of time, CPU and bandwidth.

I wish I was alone about this--but do a web search for "Mozy Sucks" and you'll see windows and Mac users who have had the same issues--ConnectionError1, it won't restore.

BUT DON'T PAY FOR MOZY. As cheap as it is, it's not worth it.

I have had all good luck using www.JungleDisk.com - first under Windows, then on the Mac (where I can still access all the Windows files I backed up).

----

Update, 9/18/09 - It's been 9 days since I got a nice email from Devin at Decho, the company that owns Mozy. He offered to help me, and has been working with engineers... and I decided to give Mozy one last chance.

But it's now been 20 days since Mozy was able to back up my files. 20 days without a backup? That's totally unacceptable. As well as, apparently, unexplainable!

Devin worked with the developers to change something on the backend of my account and hoped that would solve the problem--but I don't understand what kind of changes should be necessary to my account to make it simply connect as it has connected and should connect every day.

I'm not be facetious, I am asking as someone who has beta tested software and worked with software companies for over 25 years--why something so basic as getting and maintaining a connection is so difficult for Mozy.

After all this, how can I possibly trust Mozy to backup regularly? And another reason I want to uninstall Mozy now and be done with all this is that I'm also tired of the extra time it takes to boot my Mac because of whatever Mozy is doing, and the way Mozy slows down my computer when it's looking at my files for changes... and it takes it well over an hour to get ready to do a backup, then tells me it can't--wasted time, bandwidth and energy.

I've given them until start of day, Tuesday, to make Mozy work. If they can't, then I will uninstall it and nicely request a refund of all the money I've spent. It would be nice if they could also do something to compensate me for my lost time and bandwidth... something like an iPhone or Palm Prē would be acceptable.

---

Monday afternoon I got a call with several people from Mozy. They got it to work. Hooray! And while I still cannot restore using the app, I was able to restore online and it only took a few minutes--I selected the files, then received an email when they were ready to download. On the Mac they're downloaded as a disk image that has the files in their original folders.

So, it is possible for Mozy to work (and ever since it's worked without connection errors). That said, it still does suck up a lot of processing power and time during startup (it seems to add at least 45 seconds to startup time), and after all I've been through it's hard to trust it.

I will give it a chance and see.

If you have a problem--write a blog post that says "Mozy Sucks" and I'm sure Devin will find it and help you. Otherwise, support probably won't be able to. That's not a good way to handle support, but if you're having trouble, at least somebody at Mozy is looking for squeaky wheels.

SOURCE: http://frickingenius.blogspot.com/2009/09/mozy-sucks.html

Mozy Sucks 3: 
Page 1 of 10
Showing: Recent | Highest Rated



MOZY IS CRAP. +0
Hello Kevin, We appreciate your long membership with Mozy. I'm sorry that you feel you aren't subject to the EULA, but before installing the software or signing up for the ... read all
by MOZY SUCKS on 03 Feb - reply
[+] 1 more opinion


terrible customer service, downloads never work - +0
terrible customer service, downloads never work - if they do, they are weeks downloading, confusing information and an apathetic staff. read all

by Scott T on 09 Mar - reply - Helpful? 

Source: http://amplicate.com/hate/mozy
Mozy Sucks 4: 

This sucks
06-29-2010 01:09 PM
I've spent the last 30 minutes trying to find something called 'my tickets',

after having sent a support email to support@mozy.com on June 9, and receiving NO RESPONSE.

HOWEVER, they managed to renew my account - that works.

Sounds like the federal government must be running Mozy as well.

Our Mozy Pro account has been active since October, 2009.

We have YET to see our data completely backed up on your servers.

I began our test with about a 50 gb space, and as of last week, I currently have a 250 gb space set up.

In neither case have I ever seen beyond 40 gb backed up.

And now there is no clear way to get tech support.

Michael

sysadmin at cmda dot org

Source: http://community.mozy.com/t5/My-Account/This-sucks/td-p/3253
Mozy Sucks 6: 
1 Comment | Posted by Thijs Schreijer in Reviews

I recently lost a lot of data and had to restore it, the full set is 225GB, so thats quite a bit to download. Fortunately last summer (2010) I decided to go for an online backup service, with a set-and-forget promise for the backups. The initial backup took 2 months to complete, but after that all went pretty smooth.

So I was a happy Mozy customer (MozyHome product) for quite a while, unfortunatley the restore capabilities of the Mozy software are completely crap, and you only find out to late…

1 – Restarting system does not automatically continue a running restore (as with backups), though a restore may run for days. I had to manually keep a list of ‘small’ restore jobs I was running; eg. Pictures 2001 – 2005, next Pictures 2006 – 2008, etc). To be able to control this. If the computer is rebooted (it took me 10 days to restore) the restore job is lost, no opportunity to restart it where it left of, same for a connection failure. The mozy promise of “set-and-forget” is backup only, restore is a whole different ball game



2 – clicking the ‘restore’ button while a restore is running shows nothing, no message no warning, no queue, only experimental can be determined that the files selected will be restored once the current restore is completed. There is no queue available to manage currently scheduled restore jobs. It just leaves a very strong urge to click again (which will enqueue another, same, job)


Status windows shows no error indication

3 – an error during a restore is NOT REPORTED PROPERLY, just very easy to miss small print on the status screen. A failed restore actually reads: “83 files(25.9 GB) restored. Details”, of which ‘details’ is a link to the log. If a restore fails, I want someone 4 inches away, screaming in my face that it failed!!! Only through an accidental view of the log, I found out that two restore jobs we’re not completed. One entailed 11.000 files, of which 100 where missing, but no details on which 100 where missing nor options to retry to restore them again. Sorting the log on “transfer rate” gave me the missing files, as the failed files did not have a transfer rate. No easy way to select those only, had to manually select the ones that remained. After seeing this, I manually checked the logs after each restorejob to prevent additional trouble.

4 – way to many errors during restores. From 3-Apr-2011 to 11-Apr-2011, I have now a log of 18 restores (see screenprint of log), of which 6 failed, so this means that I had 12 jobs (6 of the 18 were restart jobs because of the failures), so a whopping 50% of the restore jobs failed. Which I had to manually restart, fiddling with the logs etc as described above. That is unacceptable!


5 – MozyServerError17 – Server Busy; when I’m restoring, I never, ever want to get a failed restore because of ‘Server Busy’, I need priority! 4 of the 6 failed jobs were because of this. I’m a paying customer and stressed-out because I suffered data-loss, failing jobs because of a ‘Server Busy’ is a no-go.

I liked Mozy until 2 weeks ago, but have changed my mind lately.
Lesson learned

Don’t go for a service thats excelling in backups, pick one thats excelling in recovery.

Backup, Mozy, MozyHome, Online, Review

Gabriel | May 13, 2011 at 14:251 Comment for About online backup services, why Mozy sucks
I have exactly the same issues… but this is a Mozy Pro account, with a business relying on it. I have more than 10 customers using the service and we will be switching them to something else. Enough is enough.

Source: http://www.thijsschreijer.nl/blog/?p=468
Mozy Sucks 7: 

EMC has transferred its Mozy online backup service, assets and staff to VMware, signalling VMWare's intent to be far more visible as a cloud IT service provider. There is no mention of any acquisition or transfer fee, which might seem odd. Surely Mozy has a value as a business and surely EMC's market worth will be diminished by …
Back to the article

This topic is closed for new posts.
Posted Tuesday 5th April 2011 10:35 GMT

Matt Hawkins
Mozy Sucks #


I used Mozy and it sucked.

Not fun when your PC boots, fails to mount a drive letter properly and then Mozy assumes that 30GB of data doesn't exist anymore and deletes it.
Posted Tuesday 5th April 2011 10:54 GMT

Ian 35
Hopeless #


I bailed out after they decided that they didn't want my business on the terms they'd sold it to me, and having uploaded ~400GB they would now want several thousand dollars a year. So I jumped, closed my account and moved to Crashplan. Took a few months to get the upload done, but their software offering is far better and their reliability is far better.
Posted Tuesday 5th April 2011 12:19 GMT

LordSauce
Switch to Crashplan #


I'm not surprised there was "no mention of any acquisition or transfer fee" - when Mozy announced the new fee structure earlier this year, people voted with their feet and moved to Crashplan - I doubt Mozy has many customers left.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/04/05/vmware_gets_mozy/

Mozy Sucks "To Infinity and beyond...!" 
Actually...just search for something like mozy sucks (or click on this link) and you'll see the 2.5 million webpages and the records of the masses who indeed have experienced the sucking that is mozy. And Mozy, if you are reading this, I'm  not saying this to be mean, rude, or for my own amusement. Instead it is with sorrow that I  say from experience, that despite, my own research and carefulness reviewing services that  "mozy sucks." 

P.S. For those who like myself, diligently read the reviews of the differing services this is another lesson learned about...