Comments on: Backing Up Hundreds of Gigabytes with Mozy

By: graeme

graeme — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:54:49 +0000

i’m almost finished with a 1.02 terabye backup and it’s only day 35. my original math had it taking another 2 weeks at my isp’s max upload, so i guess i didnt account for something. all for 5 bucks a month? i’m quite relieved.

By: Mozy user

Mozy user — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 14:09:25 +0000

Throtle based on usage. If i am using the computer, slow the backup down, when i stop the using the computer, spead my computer back up

By: Mozy user

Mozy user — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 14:05:46 +0000

Prioritize files. I have a few critical files that is use everyday. when i back up a large archve file, i am not making my backup of my important files. I wish i could tell mozy, backup my critical file every day, but when that is not changing, back up my archive files.

By: Rudi H.

Rudi H. — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:56:13 +0000

My backup had few moments when it ran as fast as 2mbits/second but for the last few days it’s been running at around 100kb/second. As I’m writing this it just jumped up to 4.4 Mbits for a few seconds before settling back down to around 100kbit/sec. At first I thought it was my internet connection but after testing it that clearly doesn’t explain it. I consistently get at least 750kbit/sec on tests and can get as high as 5mbit/sec. Not sure if I’m going to continue with the service past my first month, not looking that attractive right now….

By: Jan

Jan — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:21:54 +0000

I haven’t been able to run a backup for over 30 days now. Always encountering some kind of error after another. I’ve contacted tech support only to get one canned response after another from different technicians. Doesn’t anyone in Mozy Support read what the previous person suggested as a solution and didn’t work? No one in tech support is really reading what I am telling them what the problem is. I just keep being told that Mozy experienced errors last week and to reboot and rerun a backup and all will be well. Guess again! I’ve tried that multiple times as well as reinstalling their program, exactly following their step-by-step directions, except that didn’t work either because I ran into errors while doing that. And when I email them describing what error I encountered upon trying to reinstall I get their canned answer to “reboot and rerun and it will work”……….NO IT DOESN’T. I’m tired of this. I want Mozy to fix the problem (yes, I’ve submitted all the error logs to tech support) or just refund me my money. At this point in time Mozy is doing me no good at all. I’m a very dissatisified customer right now.

By: Mags

Mags — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:52:45 +0000

A previous poster (comment #26 from bret) mentioned that if you replace an external hard (F: in my case) drive which has been backed up to Mozy, you will loose that data, thinking that you have deleted it and no longer need it! What’s the point in backing up if Mozy makes assumptions on what I want to keep or not?

Mozy, please answer this now: is this true?

Should my 500GB external drive fail and I’m no longer able to connect it, are you then deleting this data just because the F: drive is not visible on my PC system anymore?

By: Rudi

Rudi — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:31:13 +0000

Quick update: I’m now getting 1.6Mb/sec upload speed with even larger files, pretty close to the measured maximum my ISP gives me.

By: Rudi

Rudi — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:27:10 +0000

I’ve had mozy just one week and was experiencing wide swings in the upload speed when backing up the first time. While investigating I believe it has to do with the size of the file that’s being uploaded (I’m on a mac using Mac OS X 10.5). When it was backing up my emails (113,000 files averaging about 1K) I was getting about 50Kb/sec, sometimes as little as 3Kb/sec. Bandwidthplace measured the upload speed as 1.8Mb/sec. Now that I’m backing up some podcasts (average size 3Mb) I’m getting 350-400Kb/sec.

There appears to be some overhead per file that is significant compared to the time it takes to upload a very small file but much less so for large files. Turning on debug info in the log shows that each file is split into fragments to upload, and for small files the fragments can be as little as 350 bytes! For large files the fragments seem to vary, I’ve seen up to 800K bytes in one.

If you have lots and lots of small files, how about zipping them up first them backing the archive up? I’m thinking of doing that with my email (since I can unzip it if I have to restore it). I removed backup of some folders in my email (111K of the 113K) and it finished the rest in an hour, now I’m getting much faster upload.

By: Rudi

Rudi — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:21:39 +0000

I am in the process of backing up about 20GB; I have a cablemodem with (bandwidthplace measured) upload speed of about 1.7Mb/sec. Most of the time backing up (MacPro) I’m getting about 55Kb/sec (as measured by Mozy’s status window), or somewhere around 3-4% of the available bandwidth.

I have the bandwidth limit throttline set to Max.

It’s going to take days and days.

Also, the very first time, it showed an error message that it could not connect, then the History window told me the backup was successful: all 19.1 GB backed up in 2 minutes 33 seconds, 1 file of 5.0KB was sent up. Subsequent backups are working at it but going very slowly (130,000 files total, I’m about halfway there after four days).

It’s sending up fragments in 530 byte sizes… seems rather inefficient to me.

…and I’m a paid (home) subscriber.

Is there a way to speed this up?

By: Marco

Marco — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:44:30 +0000

Restoring is very slow. It took us a few days to restore 45Gb with a 20Mb/s adsl line.