The news is out that Mozy has been acquired by EMC for $76M. That’s a staggering multiple on the mere $1.9M in capital they raised.
I’m a Mozy user, but not a happy one. I had been using Mozy on the recommendation of a friend. Many others I know use it too. The reason I’m not happy is there is using it and then there is USING it. Let me explain. I suffered a loss of data, had been backing up with Mozy, and wanted to restore the lost data. My attempts were wholly unsuccessful for the most annoying of reasons. I would log into Mozy to recover said data, select “Restore Files” from the menu, and then I’d never hear back from Mozy again. It would say “Loading Backup Information” until the cows come home. I left it running for a couple of days to no avail. I’m not the only one with this problem. I gave up on them about a month ago and set about recreating what I’d lost. In the end, the most annoying loss was my large Outlook.pst file. The rest was pretty easily recovered, not the least of which was because I’ve started using a lot of SaaS-style web applications.
Just for kicks, I tried again as I’m writing this article. I gave it half an hour of looking at the “Loading” prompt before shutting it down. You wonder if these EMC guys did any diligence before buying Mozy? Perhaps they just don’t care. Presumably EMC has the wherewithal to make whatever is wrong right. But there has to be a certain amount of negativity out there. OTOH, it’s a classic case of an app that appeared to work for a long time when in fact it was badly broken. So long as you didn’t actually need your files, the backup worked fine. Write only memory is not the answer for backing up data, no matter how smoothly it seems to work! I’m still looking for an offsite backup alternative I like.
The morals of this story:
– Test restoration of a backup. Yes, I know, the IT guys are snickering. They knew that. Apparently many of them still don’t “do as they say!”
– RAID arrays can’t be read by different motherboards. How stupid is that? You have to go out on eBay to find the same board to read your RAID array. Doh! Someone ought to fix that silly gaff.
– $1.9M is not enough capital to start a company like this. Had EMC not come along, these guys were in trouble.
Congratulations Mozy guys, you’re rich! Now where the *&%@? is my data?