Mozy restore manager

Mozy review: the restore horror story Mozy is an online backup service with an attractive pricing model. It competes with the likes or carbonite and offers a range of plans to suit any budget (even no budget). I have been using the MozyHome plan for the past year and today got to test what Mozy is like in disaster recovery mode.Two days ago I restarted Windows to apply some updates, and when I returned, the computer was stuck at the boot screen complaining about a missing system file. The following evening, when I returned from work, things were worse, the drive would no spin up, and was making metallic noises. As an aside, I must say they don't make hard drives like they used to. I have not had a single hard drive fail on me prior to year 2000, but in the past few years, I have had at least several fail.No matter, I figured this would be just an inconvenience -- after all, I thought ahead and I am paying for a backup service. A new hard drive and an OS install later, I was up and running and downloading the MozyHome client.The first bit of bad news came when I launched Mozy and it had none of my backup settings. Apparently these died with the drive, and Mozy was offering to start backing up my now empty documents folder. This gave me the first feeling of unease -- I feared Mozy would kick off backup and lose track of all the past data. I am still not sure whether this suspicion was well-founded, but the experience is certainly not the one you want to have when you are already feeling a tad on edge about the safety of your data.Next, I figured I would just do a full restore of C: drive. Mozy offered to either overwrite all existing files with those backed up, to rename the restored files, or cancel. No option to skip existing and only restore the missing files. Odd, seems like that would be an obvious feature. Still, I figured I had nothing to lose on the newly set up drive, and told Mozy to overwrite. And then the wait began.Mozy uses an extremely inefficient process to restore files. It does so one file at a time, first "Finding file on server...", a lengthy process that seems to take an amount of time proportional to the size of the file -- several seconds per file for tiny files, up to an hour for a large file. What it actually does during that time is not clear, but there are several problems with the approach: large numbers of small files take inordinate, ridiculous amount of time to restore. Imagine a directory with a thousand small files. Each file takes 10 seconds to be "found" on the server, that's 3 hours to restore what should take a minute to download. there is no prefetch while files are downloaded. Mozy, in its infinite wisdom saved and

GB, system and temp files. However, you can change Carbonite's settings to include any of these file types in a backup.The Mozy interface provides more granular control over what is backed up, and when, and seems to be preferred by power users for this reason. Mozy also offers "2x protection" which backs up files to a local hard drive of your choice while an online backup is going on. In fact, the local backup will finish up long before the online backup.Carbonite will not back up external hard drives. Mozy will, but there is one odd caveat. If an external hard drive is disconnected during a Mozy backup, its files stored on Mozy will be deleted after 30 days.Mozy also offers a DVD restoration option that Carbonite lacks. It could take days or weeks to restore several hundred gigabytes of data over an Internet connection. But Mozy will mail your backup files to you on DVDs so you can restore them faster.What About Customer Support?Carbonite has a US-based call center in Lewiston Maine, at which customers can reach a live human representative. I called and was connected to a polite rep in under a minute. Live chat is also available, as well as a Remote Assistance option, which enables a Carbonite rep to temporarily see your screen and control your computer. Home and Home Office customers can reach live support weekdays from 9am - 5pm (EST). Carbonite Small Business customers have expanded hours, from 8am - Midnight, every day.I found the customer support options for Mozy a bit lacking by comparison. Clicking the Support tab on the Mozy home page takes you to a page offering FAQs, an online knowledge base, video tutorials and a user forum. There was no obvious way to contact a human for phone, chat, or

Below to sign up now! Visit ZipCloud 2. LiveDrive – $6 per month Positives: Simple, Great price, Reliable, Instant backups Negatives: Cheapest package limited to 1 machine LiveDrive is an excellent second choice, and they are also a UK company. A few years back we weren’t very impressed with them, but they’ve slowly improved their software and customer service, and then finally dropped their prices, bringing them in from $6 per month, which puts them high on our list. LiveDrive is nicely designed and the software has all the features you need. The only criticism we have is that the cheapest package is limited to 1 machine. Visit LiveDrive 3. Mozy Positives: Next day air restore, 3 months free if paid upfront Negatives: Restore is difficult, Not unlimited space Mac crashed? Want your data quickly? Let me Fedex that for you! This is one of the great features that Mozy offers, although it does cost extra. But, downloading backups, hundrends of GB of them can take days, and this is a quick solution to this problem. Mozy don’t offer unlimited storage which is a bit of a shame. Their basic package starts from $5.99 per month, and for that price you can get LiveDrive’s unlimited storage so that does seem like a better deal to me. Mozy currently offers free trial so you might want to take a look into it. Click here to visit mozy now Visit Mozy 4. Backblaze Positives: Simple software, Unlimited backups, Good price Negatives: File