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As home computer use grows from playing DOOM to the occasional email and the casual 5 min session of web surfing into something more intrinsic to what we all do all day it becomes critical that the state and the data stored on that computer be protected.  As most of us know, having a hard disk fail or a motherboard die can not only be a buzz kill, it can wipe out your financial data, irreplaceable family photos and that Dylan collection you’ve spent half your life amassing. Being a complete tech-junkie I suffered all of the above problems about 10 years before all this stuff became mainstream.  I’ve lost count of the hours spent burning CDs, then DVDs, then setting up RAID arrays all to make sure that when the inevitable happened I’d have a fall back.  A place I could go to recover my treasure and albeit with some days of effort be able to pick up where I left off.

Then along came Mozy.  It looked a lot easier to use, offered all you could eat for the “right” price, and heck, it even had a native Mac client! The promise of backing up all my data (yes, ALL my data) without limit, to easy-to-access servers in the cloud for only $5 a month.  It seemed too good to be true but I leapt at it. After all $5 a month is nothing for the peace of mind of having your backups handled by professionals (Mozy is part of the storage giant EMC so they should knowhow to handle large volumes of data, right?) and be able to get it back either via their client, over the web or heck, even have them burn DVDs if you need them to.

Then the cold hard sting of reality hit me.  The first massive disappointment occurred after I’d waited over a month to backup my Mac Pro the first time.  The backups trickled away in the back ground and about 40 days later Mozy told me I was finally safe from disaster and that all my data was snuggly tucked away on their servers.  Then I realized I’d deleted a doc that I needed to get back and tried to recover it. The first sign of trouble was the fact that the restore client wouldn’t run. It would come up, sit there thinking for a while then die. I gave up after 2 hours of troubleshooting and went to their web UI.  Sure enough after some waiting I was able to recover my document and went back into my happy place, feeling that my $5 a month was money well spent.

a few weeks later I had to rebuild my Mac.  This where the Mozy story gets ugly and remains to this day unresolved. Having spent 2 days reinstalling and reconfiguring the machine from the ground up I was ready to put Mozy back to work, protecting all the things I care about.

The first sign of trouble was the fact that it refused to believe it had ever seen any of this data before.  Despite the fact that I had been meticulous in preserving directory names and moving the iTunes library from its annoying default location to where it had been before, Mozy insisted that it had to back it all up again.  Now Mozy is supposed to be smarter than this. It’s supposed to compare what it sees on the computer with a manifest of files it keeps in the cloud and if the files appear in that manifest then it’s supposed to just check them off the list as already backed up up and move on.  Not so here.  It started over.  I wasn’t too annoyed.  I’d just upgraded my network connection to a 5Mbps uplink so i figured it would take about a third of the time it had taken originally.  However it took less than a week before Mozy cheerfully told me that all my files were safely backed up.

Now I have ~3/4 of a TB of stuff I need to be kept safe.  A quick look at Mozy’s server UI on the web tells me that it thinks it’s got all my data in 343.1GB.  Even by my 4th grade math that’s only half of it.  I start to panic.  I try kicking off manual Mozy backups but after only a couple of minutes they stop telling everything is backed up so today I contacted Mozy’s support.

OH DEAR!  -  Here’s an extract of the “Live chat” transcript”

Mozy: How may I help you?
Howard: have Mozy running on a Mac Pro. My Mac file system tells me I have over 750GB of data to back up. Mozy tells me there is on 434.1GB of data backed up on your servers but when I run the client it tells me that the backup is finished and that there is no more data that needs backing up. Where did the other 400GB go?

So far, so good.

Mozy: Ok.. its actually 334.1GB data that is backed up, Howard.
Howard: Well the web UI tells me 343.1. that’s still 400GB short of what should be there and the client refuses to believe that there’s more to backup. It’s less than half the data.

So even their internal tools can’t give them the same value as their customer web UI or this support guy is dyslexic

Mozy: I understand..
Mozy: Are the data (750Gb) stored in your internal hard drive?
Howard: On a net attached drive
Mozy: Is it an iDisk?
Howard: a NAS
Howard: using SMB to connect
Mozy: Alright… got it now.
Mozy: Howard, I am sorry Mozy does not backs up NAS drives.

Hang on a minute! THIS page from Mozy’s support site states clearly that they support any “mounted” drive.  The NAS drive most definitely IS mounted and appeared quite happily in Mozy’s configurator as a source that I could back up. I understand not backing up a USB stick, a USB connected external drive – I’d hope so, that’s not exactly an uncommon scenario these days!

Mozy: Its designed to backup only Home computers.
Howard: This is a home computer. It has backed up part of the the data. I can see it in the restore list. It just failed to back it all up.

At this point I felt the corporate spin kicking in then the conversation went from frustrating to surreal!

Mozy: Thats due to Robust nature Mozy, Howard.
Mozy: It will try to backup but will not succeed most of the time.
Howard: OK that makes no sense. Can we escalate this call please?

I’m promised a follow up email from a more senior support person.  I can’t wait to hear from them how failing to backup my Mac as promised and as paid for makes all this a more robust solution!

A final thought.  I worked in tech support for HP for 6 years. I know support people have a hard job and that dealing with the public can test the patience and will to live of the strongest, but, when companies out-source their support functions it might look good on paper but what they often fail to realize is that they are handing their customers over to others when they are in their most vulnerable and precarious state.

There’s this abstract concept used by marketers called “The zone of indifference”.  It’s the place where customer’s go after they have gotten over the excitement of their initial purchase and they have found that the company they are dealing with doesn’t really give a hoot.  Once they go there, it’s very hard for companies to win back their loyalty and all it takes to get them to jump ship is one more fumbled support call.  The cell phone companies are a great example of companies that just don’t get this.  Seems like the online backup industry ain’t far behind them.

From “The Zone”, I bid you – buyer beware!

[UPDATE]  With the recent debacle between Microsoft and T-Mobile losing all of their Sidkick user’s personal data as part of what should have been a routine hardware upgrade by one of the most high profile storage vendors it stresses again the need for reliable back up for not only industry but for for YOUR PC or Mac.  Don’t wait until it happens to you, go buy an external disc, find a service that works (ahem Mozy) or burn DVDs if you have to.  Sure it takes time, but it’s worth it!

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Backup, Mac, Mozy, Support, Tecnology