Mozy: the extortion backup utility

UPDATE: I was wrong about Mozy and posted a update.

If you've ever lost information on your PC you're probably wishing you had made some automatic backups. Mozy is a popular online backup utility that offers 2 gigabytes of backup storage for free. Being online you don't have to worry about losing your PC or laptop, the information is stored on their servers so all your information is readily available from any PC with internet access.

Recently installing a new hard drive went awry and I may have lost some data. Once I got everything up and running I decided to reinstall Mozy and try to restore the 2gb I had backed up on their servers. When I tried to setup the account I got a error message:

AccountError5? What's that?
"If you are a MozyHome Free user, you may only register two machines with your account. If you'd like to back up a third computer, create a new account or upgrade to MozyHome Unlimited by logging in to your account here and selecting "Get Mozy Unlimited" on the left."

Ahh... so I can only have two machines. Well that makes sense, I mean I'm not paying for anything why would I need more than two machines? One is my old Windows install, second is my new installation of windows. So why am I getting a error?

Ok so sometime 200+ days ago I made a backup. I wonder what that is? Should I delete it or is it important? I'd like to download them all, what can I do?

So I have to pay $4.95/month for each of the two backups I'd like to restore, then I have to pay another $4.95 for the new installation, which means I'm now up to $15 to install the "free" Mozy service. Oh and Mozy completely understands this:

"If you’ve recently reinstalled your operating system or you’re installing Mozy on a computer that will replace an existing computer on your account, Mozy thinks you already have a machine assigned to your account. You’ll need to delete the "old" machine before you can use Mozy on your "new" machine."

Oh wonderful, so if I need to use the Mozy backup service to restore my machine, I have to delete my backup? Terrific! Completely makes sense, I mean when you create a backup and want to restore it later of course you should first delete it.

The Mozy business model is to offer the "backup" for free, but if you want to restore the backup you have to pay $10: $5 to reinstall the software to a new machine and $5 to add the old machine the backup is on.

Think I'll sign up for another service, even though Mozy is "free" it's not worth it, I'd hate being extorted to access my data, even if it is only $10.

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posted on Saturday, August 02, 2008 2:58 PM

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# re: Mozy: the extortion backup utility 8/6/2008 4:54 PM Anon

This process really is poor. It's too easy to confuse the situation, exactly how you did. If it's not too late, Here is what you really need to do:

1. Login to your account and then click "Web restore" and restore the files you want. I've had it take anywhere between 3 hours and 2 days for it to restore 2 GB of data, so I'm assuming it's on some type of queuing system.

2. Once you've downloaded the ZIP file from mozy and put all your files back where you want them, log back into your account, click "My computers" and then delete the machine (or in your case you can delete both, if you're worried about the older one, just restore it's files too so you can re-add any important stuff to your new backup)

3. After the machine is deleted, install mozy again and this time it shouldn't give you that error. I was rather upset the first time I did this because I didn't want to have to upload everything again, but the history showed a lot of "Files already on MozyHome servers" and took maybe 2 hours to do the whole thing, so it must have kept the files and knew who they belonged to. Hope this was helpful!

# re: Mozy: the extortion backup utility 12/14/2008 5:14 AM Michael

Anon,

Please tell me you're not serious! We are talking about a backup product that is used for the purposes of recovering files in the event of an emergency, right?

Any backup product that takes up to 2 or more days to send your files back to you, let alone 20 minutes, is useless! Just think of your house burning down but the firemen can't turn the water on for 2 days. What's the point?

If you have to jump through all these hoops just to get it to work, and even then there are no guarantee as to when the recovery request will be processed, wouldn't it be less painful to pull your eyelashes out one by one with tweezers?

Mozy is GARBAGE!!

# re: Mozy: the extortion backup utility 3/1/2009 3:54 PM Anonymous

John, they kind of have; as of February 2009, they now have a way to "migrate" your Mozy backups to a new computer.

That said, I've been completely puzzled by Mozy's setup since I started paying for it eight months ago. A couple months ago, I had to have a back-and-forth email conversation with support to restore files to my machine after I had to reformat, rather than it being simple. I pay $5 a month for Mozy Unlimited, so it's not like I'm just a free customer, I have 30 gigs backed up.

Now, for about 3 months, I've been using Microsoft's Live Mesh, which lets you synchronize files among several computers, windows and Mac. They only give you 5GB of space online, but that amount becomes unlimited if you sync your files *between two or more machines that you own*, and NOT with Live Desktop (the cloud).

I just reformatted again, and following Mozy directions, managed to delete my machine before performing any web restores. So even though I'm paying, I'm screwed.. unless.

If I had synced all my data with Live Mesh (or Dropbox or Sugarsync, etc), the client would right now be quietly putting everything back automatically. As it is, I have to wait for Mozy to email me back... and hope they keep multiple backup sets like they say!

# re: Mozy: the extortion backup utility 3/1/2009 3:55 PM Anonymous

(continued)

This is what I really don't understand. The most common scenario for needing to restore files has to be a hard drive crash, which I've simulated wonderfully by reformatting. So why, then, have they made it more difficult to restore backed-up files in the case of a hard drive crash than with ANY OTHER SCENARIO?

# re: Mozy: the extortion backup utility 8/27/2009 4:13 AM Sisir

Mozy is rubbish and user non-friendly and very very slow.

What the use if it is so difficult to restore backup when a Hard drive crash (backup mostly done for this purpose)

Its a garbage and total rubbish

# 2.5 GB free 11/23/2009 3:26 AM andy

found this coupon https://mozy.com/?code=KMLYU7
you get 2.5 GB free (checked, it works!)

iamjames

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