I’d been backing up my entire hard drive off-site for the last couple years with Mozy, mostly because I’m paranoid about an earthquake destroying both my main and backup drives, though other issues like fire or theft are probably more likely.
I liked their service. It was simple, it worked solidly, and the price for unlimited backup was pretty reasonable. And then.
There was some fooferal today because Mozy decided to can their unlimited service, and introduce tiered data pricing. I couldn’t remember quite how much I had backed up with them, so I went to check and see exactly how much it was, remembering it was around 100GB.
Huh, I thought when I looked at at my data total. Why is it only 80MB?
Turns out when I installed an update to the Mozy Mac client shortly before I left for Spain in early December, it wiped out all of my backup settings. The only thing that was being backed up for almost two months was my calendar database.
This, as you can imagine, severely pissed me off.
I hadn’t bothered to check that the Mozy client was backing up what I’d told it to backup because that’s just not a setting you think a company’s own software would obliterate, especially after being solid for 2 years.
But somehow, they managed to do it, and I was left flapping in the breeze until the end of Unlimited backup made me actually look at how much (or more accurately, how little) data I had been storing with them.
I chatted with one agent who told me that the files were still on the server, and if I reset my backup settings it would realize what files were already backed up, and only upload the files that were necessary.
When I got a newer version of the backup software up and running, I checked to see how big the upload was going to be. 133 GB, or basically, the entire contents of my hard drive, an upload that would take days at best.
A second agent attempted to reassure me that no, the data really was there, it would compare what was already on the server to what my software was trying to upload and the full upload wouldn’t be anywhere near 133GB.
And I realized: I didn’t believe him. I COULDN’T believe him because his company’s product had fucked up so, so badly that there was no way I could trust what they were telling their employees and in turn their employees were telling me.
I couldn’t trust that what I thought I’d backed up was actually there, and I couldn’t trust that anything I would back up in the future would ever be there. Online backup software is based primarily on trust, and they’d completely blown it.
So I canceled my account, and started the sloooooow process of re-uploading all my data to one of their competitors.
To their credit, Mozy didn’t put up a fight about refunding me the money I paid for December and January, and they offered their apologies. I said thanks, but I really hoped that whatever idiot let that code out into the wild got fired.
I did not add, though I was thoroughly tempted to, “out of a cannon.”