MozyPro is great…except when you need to restore data!
For over a year now we’ve had nothing but positive experiences with the MozyPro product, we have multiple clients with almost 1TB worth of information backed up on Mozy’s servers. All was going smoothly with the product/service up until the point of disaster. We had a client lose their domain controller to hardware failure (system board) and we needed a complete restore of data (200GB+). We thought great, we have everything off-site so all we need to do is call Mozy and get our data delivered. This is where it became a joke…
We called Mozy on a Thursday afternoon and requested a restore of our data, we followed the process to request the restore and the first snag is that during their request process they cannot deliver the restore to a Canadian address (brutal). Therefore, we had to specify the delivery to Mozy’s Utah address, and then email a specific email address with the actual delivery address. Not the end of the world…We were told that it should only take 24-48 houtrs for the restore to complete and then we would be shipped the DVDs (19 of them, brutal) Next Business Day. No problem, so we thought…
We received notification Sunday evening that our restore has been completed, we received an email Monday morning saying that our DVDs have been burnt and that they are being shipped out and we should reveive the DVDs Wednesday at the latest (due to going through the border). Keep in mind the client is currently without a production server, without email, without business files, without a network essentially. We waited patiently, followed up multiple times during the week, Thursday rolls along and we receive an email saying that unfortunately our data needs to be restored to hard drive and then shipped out. Ok, so why did you send us notification on Monday saying our DVDs have been shipped when in fact they haven’t?
At this point we decided to attempt a VSS web-restore of Active Directory, SYSVOL, and Exchange, the client has been without essential services for far too long. We initiated the process, it took hours for the data to download and start the restore, and guess what? it failed, the VSS restores for whatever reason went sideways and actually corrupted our new server rebuild (thank god for the trusted old NT Backup utility we ran before testing the restores). Ok so that’s strike 5…
We received the data on hard drive on the following Monday!! That’s a total of 11 days before we received the data to restore the server. Annoyed and frustrated we were somewhat relived that the data was finally here and we could re-attempt the VSS restores of Active Directory and Exchange. That relief lasted for about an hour as the restores of these critical pieces failed again. What did that mean? Well that meant we needed to rebuild Active Directory from scratch, re-create login scripts, security groups, distribution groups, you name it. We also needed to acquire a 3rd party utility to extract mailboxes from the Exchange Database (.edb) and re-import to a new instance of Exchange. All of this is totally unacceptable for any business, imagine one that was revenue driven or relied on their customer data for e-commerce capabilities. MozyPro is NOT a business-class product like it claims to be, if this were the case, it would not take almost two-weeks to receive backup data and it would be reliable from a restore process.
MozyPro support is hit or miss, 1 in 10 support reps were somewhat knowledeable and actually provided some assistance. That being said, not one could help with restores going sideways, backing up the data is one thing, but not being able to restore it kind of defeats the purpose don’t you think?
Conclusion: MozyPro is great for file-shares and versioning, that’s it. Do NOT rely on this solution for Exchange, Active Directory, or any other critical server component. Moving forward we will simply leverage the built-in NT Backup utility to do a OS/system state backup and then utilize Mozy to backup this file off-site.
