My experience with using MozyPro backup (mozy blog)
2007-12-09 at 11:24 pm databasemindI have been using MozyPro (mozy.com) backup for last 8 month.
My environment… Windows 2003 servers, MS Exchange 2003, SQL Server 2005 and 2000, MS Office files, etc…
I think, it is a great remote backup solution and also price is right.
I only wish it will do all things they are claiming on their web site it can do.
The following is only based on my own experience.
I had problems with backing up MS Exchange 2003 database. MozyPro would do full backup and then it supposed to do only differential backups… But on 2nd or 3rd differential backup, MozyPro would fail and would have to start full backup all over again.
Also, my exchange database wasn’t that big… Under 17 GB. But to make full backup, it was taking 4-5 full days in my environment and it is just too long to do it over and over again…
Finally after struggling for almost 6 month… I gave up and I’m not using MozyPro to backup Exchange database anymore. I just hope, it would change some day…
Another problem I had is backing up files and folders located on network share on different server than MozyPro client is running on… I was getting a lot of different Connection Errors and my backups would fail. After removing network shares from my backup catalog, I got no more errors and backups are running as they should.
Currently I’m using MozyPro on 3 of my production servers. All servers are Windows 2003.
On one server I’m backing up 5 GB, on second 70 GB and 180 GB on my third server.
I have no problem with backing up MS SQL Server 2000 and 2005 files (.mdf and .ldf) while database is in use. Also able to backup any files while in use and being open, including MS Outlook, Excel, Word and Power Point.
Also, tech support, in my opinion, is bad. They would promise get back to you, but you would never hear back from them. The solution for most of problems I had is “…it should work…” and it doesn’t. I asked them few times when fix would be available… and answer was “… in 6 month…” Great… Good thing is… I have primary backup solution in place which is backing up to tape and tape is being taking off site. I’m just using MozyPro as a backup solution to my primary backup solution. My original thought was when I started to use MozyPro, to use it as my primary and sole backup solution, but…
I did find that I can’t fully rely on MozyPro and on MozyPro support team.
All comments and opinions are welcome….
12/09/2007
We’ve been using it for over a year now and it’s never worked properly. We upgraded our server software – Office 2000 and it’s working better but it’s still unreliable. It simply fails to back up certain files within folders and for absolutely no reason. Just random unreliability. I’ve been corresponding with Mozy customer service on and off for over a year now and usually they ask for details and then I never hear from them again. They are not really that concerned or even curious about what the problem might be. If we were to rely on it it would be a form of backup Russian Roulette.
I’ve used Mozy since the Fall of 07. I have to agree – generally speaking their service is unreliable, as a backup service, NFW. I get 1 backup a week to run if I’m lucky. You experience with support is not unique either. I suspect the attitude is a result of the fact that they get “my backup don’t work” calls all day long. I’m sure the techs are thinking “Yep, so what’s new?” in the back of their minds.
6 month later from my original post, I’m planning on dumping MozyPro.
I have been having issues with MozyPro backup for past 4 month. I have contacted support many times, but issues with mozy back up still not resolved and as usual, you never hear back from mozy support team. They only assure you that everything is fine and nothing to worry about.
In last 2 month of communication with Mozy, I did send email directly to Mozy’s Director of Support Operations, David D.
I got replies from him with promise to follow up on the issue, but…. never heard back…
At this point I’m thinking on switching to iDrive or any other remote back up solution.
Only problem is for me that I’m backing up 300 GB of data and to switch to a different solution and back up 300 GB over internet again would take me about 3-4 weeks.
But at this point I have no other choice due to Mozy not being reliable back up solution and Mozy’s customer service being worth I have ever experienced.
We are a MozyPro reseller and it has not been working right for us since we’ve started. The biggest problem we have is backing up Exchange stores NEVER completes. On some the backup will restart over and over again. On others, the backup will fail saying that it could not communicate with the Mozy servers, even though none of these sites are experiencing any internet connection issues. I’ve just recently discovered that we can not trust the email reports either, as we have some clients that show have been backed up within the past few hours, but when i log into the server there hasn’t been a successful backup in weeks. I have been going back and forth with tech support for as long as i can remember. Each time the tech gives up and supposedly escalates me to someone who is more knowledgeable, but that person simply asks me to repeat the same useless steps over again (e.g. Please run a tracert, please uninstall and reinstall Mozy, etc.). At this point we are looking for someone else to move our customers to, as it is quite apparent that Mozy is never going to perform as advertised, and tech support simply doesn’t care.
I have had problems with exchange and other big backups restarting. It is very frustrating. However, I was using v1.8.8 and I found a fix that worked for me using robocopy…see below. I’ll report back on the exchange issue after I update.
The tech support at mozy recommends to use the most recent version of the software. There on 1.14 now. I am going to try that to see what happens.
I had luck getting the backups to not restart with full backups, though. I copied the files to a temporary location on the hard drive and then backing up that directory using mozy (i feel this increased the data integrity since users wouldn’t be changing files during the backup. I have a big prog on the server that stores everything in tiny files, rather than a database file).
Here’s my robocopy script:
The source is the E drive and the destination is the G drive.
robocopy /TEE /S /E /COPYALL /NP /R:0 /W:1 /b /LOG:G:\BACKUPLOG.TXT “e:” “g:”
/XD “e:\system volume information” /XD “e:\recoverybin” /XD “e:\recycler”
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Notes:
Warning: The /E switch mirrors the source directory to the destination. Therefore, it will delete anything in the destination directory that doesn’t exist in the source directory. THIS COULD RESULT IN DATA LOSS, IF NOT EXECUTED PROPERLY.
1. If copying from one drive or partition to another, check the security permissions on the drive/partition.
2. /XD excludes certain files. The ones excluded below are operating system files.
3. Robocopy download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en
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