I signed up for a 2-year Mozy account a little while ago. I like their approach to backup—it’s simple, and automatic. And it’s off-site, so if my office burns down or has things stolen, the data is somewhere else. It’s just the sort of thing I need in order to feel safe about my data being backed up.

The trouble is that this is “theoretically” safe, because I can’t seem to get it to consistently do its job on the Mac. I sent my first experience to Mozy support (their response was “make sure you’re using the latest code”) :

1. I tried backing up my home folder, a total of 70.1 GB. That 11 day process was interrupted when I closed my clamshell laptop.

2. I tried letting it continue, but realized that, actually, I don’t care about *all* of the data for now, I’d much rather know that my *most important* data is backed up. So I reduced the things Mozy should back up to about 300 MB.

3. The process continued to back things up, but paused at about 80% of 300 MB and then said it had been cancelled. I didn’t cancel it, so I’m not sure what caused that.

4. I now have the following message in my “Mozy Backup Status” window: “No successful backups yet. Last backup was cancelled 5 hours ago.”.

5. If I press the “Start Backup” button, it switches to a message that says “Backup in progress… Scanning for files…” and remains in that state indefinitely. The “Total prepared” remains at 0%, the “Total transferred” remains at 0%, and the transfer rate in both cases remains at 0.0 bits/sec.

6. I then went to my online account to see what might be listed there. Under “My Computer” it claims to have stored 268.4 MB of something (whether from the original batch, or the second, or third, I’m not sure).

Eventually, after reducing the backup load to a fraction of what I wanted to backup, it finally went through. Then I slowly increased the backup set to include most of my mission-critical files. I still wish I could backup some of my home videos and/or music collection, but that can wait.

Now, however, things are still not fully satisfactory. Today, Mozy tried to back things up again, and send my CPU into overload as it showed me that it was doing nothing (screencast here, 1 min).



I hope their Mac product is improved in the near future. I may reconsider Mozy as a backup option if not.