Mozy Madness

We use MozyPro as an inexpensive online backup solution for some of our customers at work to provide them with either a low-cost way to back up their data or as an inexpensive offsite backup solution to complement their existing backup solution. Recently though I’ve had a bone to pick with Mozy.

Mozy’s a great service, until it breaks and something goes wrong. For reasons that escape me, MozyPro’s error reporting is virtually nonexistent. A backup might fail and I either get a generic “Whoops, I done wrong” error code or I get no error code at all. This is not very helpful when your backup is failing night after night and you don’t feel like sitting up and watching the backup run until it pukes. Recently I had a customer whose Mozy backups would hang for days on end on individual files before I’d go in and restart the Mozy service to refresh the program. The file in question was almost never the same, and it wasn’t ever in use; I’d reboot the server and Mozy would just get stuck on a different file. Needless to say it was a little frustrating.

The solution came to me in a forum post I found somewhere (I forget where, but just know that I didn’t have this stroke of genius on my own) that suggested a checkdisk on the volume in question. I ran a chkdsk /r on the volume, let it run through all five stages, and then restarted the Mozy service. Worked like a champ.

Just a little something to keep in mind.