Mozy is Good But A Little Weird

Posted on July 4, 2008

I’ve needed a better backup solution for a while and after looking arouns Mozy seemed like the easiest. $5 a month is nothing when you spend all day every day on your computer.

The weird thing seems to be how it handles it’s backups. You can’t delete anything it backs up. I rearranged some of my MP3 files and now Mozy has two copies because it keeps the files structure. At first glance this is horrible. If I rearranged all my MP3s my Mozy backup would be a mess and if my harddrive died it would be pailful to download all the files twice. I wish I could delete files on Mozy.

Mozy’s solution to this seems to be that if you delete or move a file on your computer it keeps a backup… but only for 30 days. Wait… what? They are saying that if I reorganize my MP3s they will delete the old MP3s in 30 days leaving me with just my new file struncture. Great!

But what happens if I delete a file and not notiec it right away? I have a lot of files I want to back up and there is always the chance something could happen to a file without me knowing. Well it seems that if I don’t notice a file is gone in 30 days then Mozy deletes it from my backup. What kind of backup service is this? How about some persistance of data!

I get that it’s a hard problem. If you let people delete stuff from thier backup then you end up needing a backup for your backup when you accidently delete stuff from it. Mozy probably wanted to avoid this and so stoped letting people delete stuff from thier backup. This presented the problem of reorganizing files. The file has moved and it’s backup a new version what should they do with the old version? They decided that could just phase it out in 30 days.

This just seems like a horrible idea. As soon as you delete a file the counter has started and you better notice it’s gone in the 720 hours the file will stick around or it’s gone forever. I want my files to stay on Mozy as ong as I pay for it. I want to manage my own backup and delete duplicates myself. I’m fine if it’s hard to delete with multiple varifications, just make it happen. Other wise the whol idea of a backup doesn’t seem to really hold true.