Weird Mozy Experience
I read that Mozy, an online backup service, introduced a beta for Mac users over at TUAW.com. I figured I’d backup a couple of things on Mozy because off-site backup is a good idea in general.
I wanted to backup 90MB worth of documents (Mozy gives you 2GB), so I fired up Mozy and got a Mozy Backup Status window. After 80% or so was uploaded, the upload bitrate dropped to zero and didn’t come back. I checked my internet connection and it was fine. It looked like Mozy locked up.
Then I went over to cancel the backup so I could try again later. The backup would not cancel at first. I tried Activity Monitor to quit the process, but Mozy backup kept coming back after I quit the process. I also noticed in Finder that all my free space on my hard drive (a mere 6GB) was now down to 180KB. I didn’t know what to make of that. I removed Mozy from my login items in System Preferences and restarted. When I restarted, I noticed that I now had 240KB of space left on my hard drive.
I then uninstalled Mozy with Mozy’s included uninstaller and ran Onyx in hopes of regaining my 6GB. After a restart prompted by Onyx, I noticed that my menu bar didn’t look the same. I went into System Preferences and all my login items were gone. No Quicksilver, no iTunes Helper, nothing was left in my login items. Fortunately, I did recover the 6GB of free hard drive space.
While Mozy seems like a great idea in theory, I didn’t have such a great experience with the software.
Try it out if you’d like over at Mozy — maybe your experience will be different.
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I had a similar experience. I was trying to backup and it stopped at 14%, I then emailed support to ask them what to do. They said to uninstall it and then reinstall it, that pretty much fixed everything but they also said this could be happening because you have to little hard-drive space left, since mozy caches all the files you upload temporarily. You should email the bug in, they have a good support team.
Yes, I too had the same experience. The mozy.log file (located at /var/log/mozy.log) grew to over 6.2GB and completing taking OS X down with it.
I am basically not willing to give it another shot until I see an updated OS X beta. If it happened once, it will likely happen again.
Mozy won’t even start properly for me. Well, it starts, then it begins checking the account info and scanning for backup sets and then it crashes.
Were those guys at Mozy in hurry or something? Is their storage similarly “reliable”?
mozy worked fine for me with A LOT (about 9 000) small files. the problem started with some big files (about 500mb each) – log filled my disk and program died. the idea thought is cool and i will support it. it seems far much better offer than apple’s one. come on, 5$ a month for unlimited storage seems reasonable for a backup place. guys from mozy have much work to do (windows client rulez and works as expected – tested under my works PC). i’ll give them as much tests as i can because it looks like a quite good offer.
excuse my english – i’m working on it :)
I had the same thing, GBs big log file. Useless software until they fix it. I complained, and they told me to reply with the log file (even though I had told them it was 6GB big and pasted relevant lines from it in my initial email). Not very impressed.
You could (temporarily) try symlinking the logfile to /dev/null, and then run mozy. That would be a quickfix to that big logfile bug.
ln -s /dev/null /var/log/mozy.log
I recently had the issue with an overgrown log file. Hey, it’s beta! Aside from the issue with the logfile, it’s been a great service. After trying it for a couple of weeks and verifying 3 restores at different times, I gladly ponied up for the unlimited plan!
It ain’t free, but BackJack (www.backjack.com) works flawlessly. My last job had over 100 Macs on it and I use it at home. Backing up my work, email, & important documents is well worth the $17.50/mo.
I was looking at Mozy and it seemed like a good idea
But I was wondering
I have a 100GB FTP server
Anybody know of a free program like Mozy that would let me upload to my own web space?
Pleaseeee email me if you do -> toby [at] tobybenjamin.com
THANK YOU!
I didn’t even get to the backing up part. I installed and selected a folder to backup, but it didn’t seem to “see” all the files in the selected folder, and for some of the ones it did see, Mozy gave incorrect file sizes (e.g., one small Excel file Mozy evaluated at over 1 GB!). Needless to say, I decided to hold off using the app until I was sure it would do what it said it was going to do. Reading this thread, I’m glad I did. I’ll wait until a new beta comes out, thanks very much.
That said, the app itself looks pretty nice. Hope they work the bugs out soon.