Over the course of the past few months (since early November) I have been on a kick to have a real backup strategy for the computers in my household. I had been using Time Machine with our old PowerMac for a few months (since upgrading to Leopard), but it’s actually not my main machine. I spend most of my time on my new laptop (a MacBook Pro), and it has been woefully unprotected since I got it a couple of months ago. Worse still is the state of our Windows XP desktop. We’ve had that machine for about 5 or 6 years, and I’ve only backed it up once, a couple of years ago.
If any one of these hard drives completely died it wouldn’t be a complete disaster, since many files are on more than one machine (music files, some pictures, some important documents). This hasn’t been a backup strategy so much as result of not having a good means for sharing files. In any case, losing a hard drive would be real pain. Many things would be lost forever, and sifting through the other machines to recoup what I could wouldn’t be much fun.
You would think that I would have learned my lessons. About 8 years ago I lost a computer to what I assume was some freak electrical surge. Every component in the thing was fried, including the hard drive. In that case, I did have a backup of important documents that was just a few months old. Frustrating, but not too tragic. And about 4 years ago, I heard the tell-tale clicks of a dying hard drive coming from my Powerbook. Luckily I was able to clone the drive just before it completely failed. Disaster averted!
Welcome, Mozy
So, I finally got serious about backing up. I had read about this online backup service, Mozy, some time ago, and decided I would check it out. It’s a pretty good deal:
- About $5/month for unlimited storage.
- It’s supposed to be easy to set up and use.
- It’s Mac & PC friendly.
- Files are stored remotely, so we’re set if the house burns down, or something equally tragic happens. We may lose the furniture, but at least the MP3s are safe from smoke and water damage.
- It’s encrypted (or at least they say it is) with super-strong 448-bit Blowfish encryption. I don’t know that much about encryption, but I do know that blowfish are fairly poisonous, so I figure my data will be safe from marauders.
I checked out a bunch of other online backup providers too, but I was sold on Mozy. So, I signed up for one year on two machines (for my laptop and the PC).
Getting Going
I figure that even though I’ve got many, many gigabytes of data to backup: (a) UNLIMITED storage for one low price, (b) I’ve got pretty fast DSL at home, and (c) even if it takes a long time (several days? a week or more?) to get through the first backup, after that it should be smooth sailing. Mozy does differential backups (just backs up the changed files), so after the initial pain, it should be all good.
As far as I remember, installation was pretty simple on both machines. There are even some nice controls for throttling the bandwidth so that your internet connection isn’t completely saturated with sending backup files all the time. Nice.
So, I start the first backup going on both the PC and the Mac. It’s slow. Really, really slow. I know that part of this is the nature of trying to upload a lot of data on a home DSL connection (slower on the upload than the download), but it seems inordinately slow. So I decide that it’s probably not a good idea to do the first backup on both machines at once. I cancel the laptop’s backup, and the PC starts to make better progress. The estimate is that it will take several days, which is fine. We were about to head out of town for a few days for Thanksgiving, so I figure that by the time we get back it will be done (or close). When we get back, the status says that it’s something like 60% complete. I’m a little surprised that it’s not farther along, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable, so I leave it to do it’s thing. A few hours later, it hasn’t made any more progress. Something froze, and it’s not clear why. After I get it started up again, I find that Mozy is starting over from the beginning. Tens of gigabytes of data were transferred, but none of it is saved on Mozy. I should have just given up on Mozy right then. But, after some trial and error on both the Mac and the PC I finally resign myself to the idea that Mozy cannot suspend and resume backups.
Did I mention that I planned to use Mozy with my laptop? Do you know what I do with my laptop frequently? I take it places. To do that, I close the lid and it goes to sleep for a bit. So, unless I’m willing to leave my laptop connected for a week or more just to see if it will eventually finish the initial backup, I’m out of luck. That’s just not reasonable. This is a complete failure for an online backup service.
At this point, I’ve already paid my money, so I figure I will keep playing with the settings and back up a smaller amount of data, just some really critical things. Well, critical files that aren’t too big, anyway.
The User Interface
(Backup Sets tab and Files and Folders tab)
(Backup Sets Edit dialog and Scheduling tab on the Preferences dialog)
The UI doesn’t have a lot going on. I usually appreciate that. But on first blush and after using it for a while, it’s just not clear what’s going on. That’s not good. My model for what I should be able to do is:
- I choose files and folders that I want to back up (either based on their location on the drive or based on file type), then add these to a new or existing backup set
- Mozy shows me a summary of what’s going to be backed up.
- I can choose to start backing up immediately, set it for a time in the future, or schedule it for a recurring time.
I’m pretty sure you can do most of that here, but it’s not clear.
Big Problems
- Mozy can’t suspend and resume backups. This should just happen automatically. With a laptop, this makes Mozy useless for me. Even for a desktop, it’s not really acceptable. This is especially true for home users, where network interruptions are a fact of life. I have a DSL connection with a dynamic IP address at home. I don’t know how often Verizon forces me to renew the DHCP lease, but I’m guessing that may have something to do with why I never am able to finish a backup.
- Mozy freezes and crashes all the time. Not really a UI design problem per se, except in the sense that it makes the product unusable.
- The “Backup Sets” tab is not a list of backup sets. It is, instead, a list of search queries and folders that you want included in your backup set. As you can hopefully see, the construction of the queries is inscrutably arcane. You better like their default queries! You can also add folders on this tab. Wait, then why is there a Files and Folders tab?
- You only get one backup set. Since that list of backup sets isn’t really a list of backup sets, I’m pretty sure you only get one configuration. It’s not the worst limitation in the world, but it’s a pretty severe limitation. You choose what you want to back up, and that’s it, as far as I can tell.
- It’s not clear what’s being saved when you “Save Configuration”. You can select different things on the Backup Sets and the Files and Folders tabs. The “Save Configuration” button is placed outside of the tabbed area, leaving some ambiguity as to what you’re actually saving. Is it the selections on both tabs, or just the one you’re looking at?
- The main application doesn’t include a control to start a backup immediately. You can only do this from the drop-down in the menu bar, unless the drop-down in the menu bar is broken, like mine (notice how everything is grayed out, so I can’t select anything?). I’m not a fan of design by feature list, but this is one I’d put on my feature list for backup software.
- Scheduling is tucked away in the preferences. Scheduling your backup is one of the main tasks associated with backing up, on a par with choosing what to back up, and so should be a part of the main interface.
The Little Stuff
- The application is constantly calculating file sizes. Whenever it displays something new (meaning on launch), it starts calculating. It does this for things whether or not they are selected, so it pretty much means counting all the folders, files, and sizes on your hard drive. Do you know what a crazy resource drain that is? I’ve had Mozy up in the background for 10 minutes or so, and it’s still calculating. If you try to actually click around in the UI too much while it’s calculating it will freeze the app and then crash.
- The Save Configuration button quits the application. What? Is that a joke?
- The table in the Edit Backup Set dialog is sorted by Location. I can see how this kind of makes sense, except when it doesn’t. The column headings are clickable, but they do not sort. There’s also no indication in the header of which column is the sort column. Annoying!
The Saga Continues Ends
I signed up for Mozy almost 3 months ago. I still don’t have a successful, completed backup. Instead, I bought some external drives. Time Machine works great on the Mac and Retrospect Express works on the PC. It probably took less time to set up the drives than it did to write this post. I still don’t have the security of off-site backups yet, but I’m better off than I was before, and certainly better off than I am with Mozy.
Update (Feb 2010): I gave up on Mozy and cancelled my account before the annual renewal. If you read the comments you’ll see that they’ve tried to make improvements, but it sounds like they still haven’t delivered on the promise of a good online backup solution. External drives are cheaper, faster and they actually work, so I’m sticking with that for now.
