I have been using Mozy.com for online backup of two desktop machines in our office about 7 months now without any significant problems. I have been very satisfied with the price and performance of this solution until last weekend.

On Saturday morning I was trying to perform a small bit of maintenance on one of our websites from home.  After determining I needed a file from my office machine to complete the work, I tried to perform a “web restore” from my Mozy.com backup.  After logging into my Mozy account, I found and selected the file (a single 30k file) I needed to restore and submitted the job.  I figured it may take several minutes until the restore was ready, even 30 minutes wouldn’t be a big deal.  So I waited…and waited…and waited. After 45 minutes of waiting I ran out of things to do on the website and threw in the towel.

Several hours later I checked my Mozy.com account.  Still waiting…  A few hours later I checked again, no dice.  At this point I decided to send Mozy support an email.  And still I waited.

At 8:22am on Sunday, about 22 hours after I submitted my file restore, I received an email from Mozy indicating my restore request was complete.  Great!…but it was easier and much faster for me to go to the office, get the file and put in on the website.  For fun I retrieved the “restored” file and opened it successfully. Happily it was the right file.

At 9:26pm on Sunday I received a response from Mozy support explaining why my file restore did not happen quickly. I have reproduced it below.

“Web Restores are done on a first come, first serve basis. Restore build time depends on how many people have requested restores before you. Sometimes they will build quickly, but others it may take quite a bit of time. We ask that you please be patient while the restores build. I can see that the restore finished today. This delay happens when there is a large volume of restores pending.”

This may or may not be an truthful explanation of the situation regarding my restore request.  In a previous life, I was in enterprise storage administration and know this stuff should never take this long.

Possibly Mozy does not have sufficient infrastructure to deal with the number of restore requests they receive, I will never know. What I do know is that I will now be giving Carbonite online backup a try. Their price is very similar to Mozy.com and the performance of their restore service can hardly be worse.  I am certainly glad this wakeup call happened now rather than when I really needed them to perform.

If you have any experience, good or bad, with Mozy.com or any other online backup provider, I would love to hear about it.

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