.FLYINGHEAD KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES’ BACKUPS
.TITLE Cloud backup failures and a potential possibility
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY We didn’t have good results with our cloud backup strategy.
.OTHER
A few weeks ago, we introduced you to [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue201009/00002558001.html|our new series on family backups]]. We put together a composite of the Jones family, a tech-enabled family with 11 computers at home.
Over the past year, we’ve been looking at solutions for performing reliable family backup. This turned out to be a much larger project than we intended, and we had a number of false starts.
We wanted to put together a combination of both in-house backup and cloud backup. It can take a very long time to sync files to the cloud — and an equally long time to restore them, so we wanted cloud backup to be a backup solution, a set-it-and-forget it option in case the local backup failed.
There are a number of services that offer very-low-cost answers for online backup. If you only have a few, small files, cloud backup could be your only option. But for the Jones family, with terabytes of data, writing to the cloud was, essentially, a fallback strategy.
That’s a good thing, because we didn’t have good results.
.H1 Distrusting Carbonite
We first learned about low-cost online backup when we met Carbonite in 2007. I did an [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200710/00002075001.html|interview with Carbonite founder David Friend]] in October of that year.
The interview didn’t go well. In fact, after publishing the interview, we were contacted and chastised by Carbonite’s PR people.
What was worse, and here’s what convinced us that we could never, in good conscience, recommend Carbonite, was CEO Friend’s response to a question I asked about securing backups.
Here’s his response to me:
.QUOTE David: You’re a real worrywart. Any type of backup carries some risk.
When the CEO of a backup company tells you that you’re a worrywart, it’s time to look elsewhere.
.H1 Mozy failure
We thought we had a good answer with [[http://www.mozy.com|Mozy]]. Unlike Carbonite, which lives or dies based on whether it gets its next round of venture financing, Mozy is a division of the giant EMC.
Unfortunately, we found a number of critical failure points with Mozy that makes us give it a poor review.
First, the Web software is terrible. If you want to restore a single file, it can take 20-30 minutes for the Web page to even come up, and often the page would fail, necessitating a retry.
The local client software is also terrible. It, too, takes a tremendous amount of time for simple actions, like opening an options screen. Worse, it also takes up gobs and gobs of system memory. If you have a lot to backup, you’ll need a lot of RAM.
Third, tech support is virtually non-existent. We’d post chat questions, send in email questions, and leave voice mail messages and only if we wrote to Mozy PR and let them know we were doing a review did we ever get a response.
But here’s where Mozy really failed and where it gained it’s low-star review: it didn’t backup our files.
One of the reasons we waited to run this series of articles is we wanted to see how the products would perform in a real-world situation. So we waited for the inevitable crash.
Last month, it happened. A drive died.
We tried to recover our files from Mozy but were shocked to find that many directories only contained subsets of our files. Some directories on the Mozy server were completely empty.
In other words, had we relied on Mozy, we would have lost a lot of our data. That alone would have garnered Mozy our rarely-dispensed 1 rating. But then the company added insult to injury.
We were just billed for another month of service. It’s not much, we paid all of about $20/month for our four test machines. Right after we were billed, we discovered that the restore had failed and so we cancelled our service.
No problem so far. But do you know what they did? Even though we had something like 25 days left we’d paid for, Mozy went ahead and notified us that they deleted all our backup data. They didn’t wait until our paid membership ran out, but destroyed our data immediately on cancellation. That alone would have garnered them a 1-out-of-5, but, you know, they were already in the doghouse.
Despite our high hopes, Mozy gets a measly 1-out-of-5. Don’t use this service.
.RATING 1
.H1 Considering CrashPlan
We are looking at yet another cloud service and, hopefully, this one will work better. Unfortunately, since we just found them, we won’t have any results to report for some time.
[[http://crashplan.com|CrashPlan]] is actually less expensive (in volume) than Mozy. If you have 10 computers, with Mozy you’d pay $49.50 a month. CrashPlan charges $100/year for an unlimited number of machines.
In addition, CrashPlan works on Windows, Mac, and even Linux and Solaris. One other feature we really liked with CrashPlan was their Seed Disk program. For an additional $149, CrashPlan sent us a 1TB disk which we could fill up and send back, saving us months in upload time.
CrashPlan also allows free backup between machines and even between your machine and your friends, to provide your own form of mesh backup.
Unfortunately, we’ve only just met the CrashPlan folks, so we don’t have any idea how their program will be when the bits hit the wall, but we can say this already: their support is far superior to Mozy.
We’ve sent all sorts of questions to CrashPlan, not as press, but simply as a customer. We’ve gotten intelligent answers back the next day, even on Saturday and Sunday. That, alone, beats the pants off Mozy.
If CrashPlan can actually recover lost files, then, perhaps, we might actually have a winner.
Stay tuned.
.BIO
