One of the questions we see time and again is whether or not Mozy can backup USB (external) drives. Well, since we have a Mozy account, and we have an external drive, we thought we’d give it a shot.
Update: Be sure to read this post in the Mozy Support section, Does MozyHome support external drives?
First, open “My Computer” (or, on Vista, simply “Computer”).
Next, find your external drive, right-click, and choose “Add to MozyHome Backups”
Well, that was easy. How can you test if it worked? Simple: open your drive and look for Mozy’s icon overlays. If you see a red exclamation point over the icons, it’s in the backup set, but not yet backed up. If you don’t see anything, hit F5 to refresh the view.
One thing we’ve heard, however, is that an external drive that isn’t present when the backup starts will be dropped from the backup set. So we tested this theory.
We unplugged the external drive, then manually started the backup process. Once the backup was done, I plugged the USB drive back in, and checked for the icon overlays again. To my surprise, they were there! Hrm… maybe just a display bug. So I checked my MozyHome configuration, and the “G” drive was listed, and checked to be backed up!
Since my “G” drive is my local backup (using Acronis), I unchecked it, as a backup of my backup is a bit much, especially when it’s 140GB in size!
Tags: Mozy
[...] http://www.onlinebackupsreview.com [...]
There is a major problem with MOZY and external drives. It happened to me.
If your external hard drive goes offline for ANY reason, Mozy software will detect this and actually delete whatever backup it has off its server.
This is no joke. It happened to me. I had 200GIG uploaded (took two months to upload that BTW) and it was gone from Mozy servers as soon as I disconnected my ext hard drive. What if I actually had a hard disk crash?
Mozy does cover their ass because they give you 30 days to recover the file using their archive retrieval process.
But what if you didn’t know that a file got corrupt or you deleted it by accident? Well, too bad. Its gone on the 31st day.
This is just insane and not a backup strategy at all. It goes against everything a backup strategy is – to protect you from loosing data for ANY reason. I’ll say that again, for ANY reason.
If you don’t believe me, go to this link from the Mozy support site.
http://support.mozy.com/docs/en-user-home-win/faq/concepts/deletefile_markedforbackup_faq.html
“If you delete a document and then run a backup, Mozy assumes that you no longer need a backup copy of that document, and marks the file to be removed from our system. (We keep it on file for 30 days, just in case you change your mind.)”
Are you kidding me? Assumes? It’s on their website!!! ASSUMES!!!
Bottom line – mozy is not a backup strategy at all. Their business model is based on providing you little storage space as possible and deleting files off their servers as soon as they can. Not to mention it would take you up to 6 MONTHS to upload 500Gig of data. It’s a waste of your money. Buy an external HD (they are cheap) and bring it over a friends house to keep off-site.
I want to scream this at the top of my lungs how this dirty little secret can screw people over.
Hey Jeff –
Sorry to hear about your frustrations with Mozy. From what I’ve found, ANY backup service that offers unlimited space will delete files after a set period, such as 30 days. Otherwise, you could use it for unlimited online storage, which is NOT what they are.
Yea, I had the same thing happen to me with the USB external hard drives. I have a computer that is dedicated as a backup computer so it does Nothing but backups. It has a dedicated usb hard drive attached to it as well.
One day, for some resaon, the usb drive dropped off windows long enough that mozy thought it wasn’t there anymore and deleted the 700 gigs of data I had uploaded over the period of many months. This is the reason I am leaving Mozy for Crashplan when my 2 year subscription is up. In fact, I’m already using crashplan from my laptop to my work computer now just in case mozy screws up again. Which I’m sure it will since this has happened 3 times to me. That is why I dedicated a computer to the backup cause. ANYWAY, mozy stinks if you have external drives which is where ALL of my data is at.