Good news and bad news. The good news is that when I switched to Windows 7 in early January, I thought the “custom installation” would reformat my hard drive, so I copied all my files to an external drive. And not quite trusting Mozy after the last round of problems, I never deleted the backup.
So most of my photos have been recovered.
Of course, I didn’t have a local backup of anything since early January – so for starters, all my Snowmaggedon photos are gone, including the only photos I’m ever likely to get of Wylie “swimming” through snow up to his ears. I’d been counting on Mozy to protect those.
Today’s developments:
I started another restoration attempt before heading to work this morning. When I came home this evening, it had failed with a message about not being able to connect to the network. From the message, it’s not clear whether this is a Comcast issue, or Mozy.
During the day, I received a reply from Mozy’s technical support, suggesting that I try restoring the files via their web interface. I tried that last night – the failure message was generic, and I didn’t write it down, but in essence it said, “There was a problem. Try again.”
More interestingly, around 1:15pm, I received an email from someone who as nearly as I can tell (via Google) works in Mozy’s PR department, asking for my contact information. I’ve sent it to him and I’ll be interested to see what this leads to.
4 thoughts on “Mozy Backup Failure – Day 2”
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While writing this entry, I started another restore attempt, this time of just the photos taken in 2010. Fortunately, I organize my photos (mostly) chronologically. So that’s another block of files restored, but not everything is stored in that sub-tree.
I’ll be interested to see what happens if/when I talk to Mozy’s PR person. But there’s really not much point to having a system of backups if you can’t count on it. And right now, I’m having some fairly serious doubts about whether I should trust Mozy.
I work for a backup software company and I hate seeing people suffer trying to restore files and not being able to get them. You trust a company, in this case Mozy, with your data that you actually took the time and initiative to backup and it isn’t there when you need it. I wish you the best of luck with getting your data back, and hope that your experience with Mozy does not shy you away from trusting online backup in general. Though, as you learned, it is always best to have a local copy and an online copy. Some pieces of backup software allow you to do both in one program and interface, such as my company’s software NovaBACKUP, but I am sure there are others out there too.
I agree that the idea of offsite backups are important, and the concept of automated online backups is a good one.
Unfortunately, it’s also a relatively new industry and there still seem to be a number of rough edges to work out in terms of both the software and the support. One thing I find particularly interesting is the number of backup services where the EULA specifically disavows any warranty that the product is suitable for any specific purpose (for example, backing up your computer).
I’ve not read any reviews of NovaBackup and therefore have no basis for judging its relative merits. I would strongly encourage anyone considering a backup product to spend some time with their search engine of choice, looking into reviews both positive and negative.
I totally agree with you! When choosing a piece of software or service to handle your data it is time well invested in researching the reliability and ease of use of the software. It is also worth actually trying their support to make sure that you can get decent response time, and maybe actually talk to a human at the other end of the phone. 😉