MOZY Issues

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MOZY online backup generally worked well for me, but at one point it stopped doing local backups and looking at the logs, there were a lot of errors, including what looked like database corruption. After back and forth with MOZY support, during which I learned a lot, I decided to uninstall and re-install the client and start over. This seemed to have solved the problem. But...

Things I learned

  • Mozy installs as a Windows service called MozyHome Backup Service. It normally starts automatically and takes care of itself, but during the figuring out stage, I found that it had been stopped for some reason.
  • Mozy uses the Volume Shadow Copy service, which sometimes stops for some unknown reason. It is this service that allows Mozy to make copies of open files, and it seems that it will run without it, but then has "snapshot" problems.
  • You don't have to back up most files that live in c:\Program Files. By looking at the backup logs, I found that it was trying to back up email cache files, and other working files used by running software. Whenever I have a problem with snapshot errors, I have specifically removed these files from the backup set, usually by eliminating the whole directory they live in.

March, 2011:

Because of a pretty major price increase associated with Mozy discontinuing "unlimited" backups, I removed Mozy in favor of CrashPlan. Details: Crashplan notes