G7 countries compared in terms of the percentage of the population between the ages of 25-64 with post-secondary degrees. Highest: Canada, Lowest: Italy.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Mozy 2.0 client is a fiasco
Just a heads up to current and potential new clients of the Mozy online backup service: The Mozy 2.0 client is a big flop. Do not install it, in its current form, barring any major updates, under any circumstances. Not only is it a nightmare from the customer perspective, but potentially in the wider public relations sense -- though, obviously not quite to BP proportions!
I have been a happy MozyHome (exactly like MozyPro, but for non-commercial use) user for over 3 years now (yes, that makes me an early adopter) and have often cheer-leaded for them to family and friends. It has given me peace of mind for my 150 GB worth of data as I bounced from one side of the Atlantic to the other with my laptop.
Then came last week. As I had never experienced any issues with their service, when I received the latest client newsletter (that looked a bit like the following post on the Mozy blog) exalting the benefits of the newly released version 2.0 client, I didn't hesitate to download the upgrade. Big mistake. I'll spare you the gory details, but, in summary: it failed to install properly in Vista 64-bit, forcing me to reinstall the old client, version 1.16 (but only after a forced brute-force uninstall of all traces of Mozy, which caused the loss of all my customized settings) and somehow made it not work anymore (despite anything the tech support tried to suggest), finally making me resign to trying 2.0 again, which now oddly installed, but now failed to upload a complete backup set (this seems to be a common issue mentioned on message boards) all the while growing in CPU resources over time (rendering the computer useless). And that's just the beginning of the oddities.
Luckily (though, truly, it's a bastardization to call all this useless time and effort anything remotely related to a fortuitous situation), the evil Mozy 2.0 client accepted to be deinstalled cleanly this time and I was able to once again install the 1.16 client (1.16.4.0 to be precise, still available here). My good luck did not end there, 1.16 now worked perfectly again, just as it did 10 days ago...
Given all the unhappy, sometimes ireful, posts in the Mozy Community message boards, this is brewing to be a serious problem that Mozy's farmed-out tech support is having difficulty handling. Of course, this is not a tech support issue, but a software development issue; more specifically a gross failure in proper stability and regression testing.
It's just one big flop in a company with a good track record, but hopefully they can fix this soon. We're currently all seeing how a single mistake can quickly grow to a debacle and threaten a previously-strong company's very survival. (Yes, I'm talking to you BP!)
