Mozy insists: It's not a bug...

Not an archival service, really ?

Could someone please explain to me the difference between a backup and an archive ?

I've worked in environments where "backups" were done on tape every day, with the now traditional one tape per day, one per week, one per month scheme, with enough tapes to keep a full year of data.

How exactly is that not a 365-day rolling archive system ?

Nuts to that excuse. They just forgot about, or specifically decided to forbid, archiving to external discs and are now trying desperately to spin it in a semi-positive way.

Own up to your mistakes, people. You actually get respect for that these days because so few people/companies have the balls to do so.

Home online backup is universally rubbish

Having just navigated the waters of on-line backup solutions for all my precious data at home, I would caution the reg to start writing about errors and bugs on them - It could occupy all the articles from now on!

All the software I tried (Mozy included) felt like it have been churned out by a couple of coders with only a week to spare and with no time to test it. Mozy got repeatedly stuck when pausing a large backup set and only a machine restart would fix it - hardly something I liked doing with an always up server. The bandwidth limiter seemed to work on some kind of average, going full speed for a few minutes then waiting. Lastly all of them assumed the user had no knowledge of anything, culminating in Backblaze insisting that the whole of C: needed to be backed up regardless of what I wanted.

The only one I found with a redeeming feature was LiveDrive and that was FTP, which through SyncBack is happy backing up all my data as we speak. Why I should have to rely on FTP and external software is ridiculous with all the competing backup companies. (for anyone who's interested I recommend purchasing LiveDrive through GD9 Backup reseller - its much cheaper for the same service - p.s. no affiliation to me)

This whole "a backup isn't an archive" is a fallacy

The reason is simple - words in the English language mean what English people, collectively, intend them to mean. The fact that some technical society had some specialist definition that made sense in data processing departments in the 1970s or whenever is irrelevant to what the ordinary meaning of the word "backup" is right now.

The purpose of a backup is to ensure that if you lose your primary copy of your information, you can always recover it from the backup. That is what people understand by the term "backup". If that implies you need what someone happens to call an "archive", then anything else isn't a backup anyway.

What I honestly don't understand is why people selling backup-related products don't understand this common-sense principle. Maybe there's some marketing thing where they think they can sell two or three different useless products instead of one that just works. The reality is that if someone loses essential data that they thought was safe because of the behaviour of your backup product, all the excuses in the world won't change the fact that they will rightly never trust your products again.

One last thing, though. If you don't know precisely how your backups work and in precisely which circumstances your data is recoverable, or if you haven't actually tested that you can recover your data, you deserve to lose it anyway. If you were too lazy to take responsibility for your data, blaming someone else is never going to bring that data back.

Humyo is not necessarily the answer

I've found Mozy fairly reliable although i agree it can take a long time to update where large chunks of files change between 'backups'. Actually in my experience I've recovered deleted files that were much older than 30 days so I'm not sure their system works exactly as they claim in that regard. It may be that space issues trigger deletion of files over that limit when necessary.

Humyo might look nice and work well, but I would not consider a service that does not encrypt the files stored on their servers, however secure they may be. I'd rather not run the risk of staff rooting through company files or security leaks exposing files to any passing hacker thanks.

20:20 Hindsight

"Future versions will more intelligently detect what files on external drives are new and what is already backed up. This will reduce the frequency of the checking process."

Ah the old "Future versions" line. If only my system needed to be restored in the future. Silly me for not having the foresight to need to install my OS at some unspecified date some time from now as opposed to last week.

I'm with L2 support now, who seem to be a vast improvement over the initial support person who seemed unable to read the content of my email regarding Mozy uploading all my files again.

Interesting to read about optimisation work on their servers as L2 support didn't mention anything about it, or answer any specific questions in my correspondence with them. Support got me to make some changes so the client would think it had been newly installed (which I had previously tried with no luck with re-associations) which makes me suspect their servers were the issue. This time I got around 78% of my files being recognised as on Mozy's servers. 78% is not a Backup Service. It still leaves me with around 10 days of upload time and an unanswered question as to why some are found but others are not. Add the fact that the Client doesn't report the files being transferred correctly and you're left with someone who has zero confidence in their service.