Mozy Online Backup: Good or Bad?

For those of you unfamiliar with online backup, it’s a way to transfer copies of your data offsite via the Internet, to major reputable storage providers. The downside is that if you have a lot of data, your first backup could take some time, specially over a slow connection. And by today’s standards, a full T-1 line at 1.5 Mbps is rather slow. For example, the first backup of 100 GB of data using a T-1 could take as long as two weeks. Subsequent backups copy only files which have changed since the last backup, and thus run more quickly.

Mozy is a leader among online backup services. Our experience with Mozy includes backing up about a dozen of our servers several times per day over the past 2 years. We have restored several files on various servers successfully and gained a good amount of confidence in the Mozy system.

However, a recent Mozy failure left our team befuddled. The Mozy software on one of our servers started to fail, throwing the message, “Server Error 12″, which no error description. Mozy Tier-1 support asked us for the backup log from our server. The first thought here was, shouldn’t Mozy have the log?

After several email volleys with tier-1 one and no resolution, we had to request escalation. The tier-2 engineer said the issue was due to Mozy’s “manifest” file for our server being corrupt, and that a repair could take days. He further advised that our best option would be to simply purchase another server license and start the backup from scratch. By the way, the “manifest” is the database with all the information about your computer and what’s been backed up. It resides on Mozy’s end. Another irony: what doesn’t Mozy back up the manifest file?

Just before we set out to start from scratch with the server backup, we tried starting a backup job from the server one more time just for sanity, and magically, it worked. When we asked Mozy support what happened, they answered, “oh by the way, the repair of the manifest was successful.” So the backup is indeed running fine once again.

In conclusion, we have to give Mozy credit where it’s due. It’s not 100% reliable, but then again nothing is. Mozy’s system works for the most part, but I would have another mode of backup just in case. Mozy’s tech support process is far from refined, and at least in our case, left many questions unanswered.

If you’re looking for Mozy alternatives, check out Jungle Disk and Carbonite.