After Mozy's Time Capsule fiasco, looking for cloud alternative

I've kind of had it with Mozy as an adjunct to Time Capsule (e.g. the fire or burglary scenario). I'm a very new customer, a paying customer. It affected my Time Capsule adversely and Mozy has been zero help (details below for potential Mozy customers who want the grisly details). I'm wondering what other options there are out there to back up to a cloud somewhere and am looking for recommendations from someone who had good recovery experiences with postal-mailed recovered files from a service that will work alongside Time Capsule or maybe even integrate with it in some way.

If I might digress for an example... Not too long ago I had a hardware failure with a hard drive (that wasn't networked with the Time Capsule), a unit the Apple Store said was a goner and one that resisted a variety of recovery programs, and this great discount repair place I found (Sassinsky) let me send them a portable hard drive along with my iMac's heart. A week later, back came all my files in separate drive partitions on that portable just as my original hard drive had been partitioned, all the data in the right places. I love those guys at Sassinsky. This is what I want from the cloud, too.

As for Mozy, I've read some user posts of horror stories in how their recovered files came back, scrambled over multiple disks. But in fairness to Mozy, some of those posts are pretty old. So to refocus on my question, are there services out there that will coexist with Time Capsule and that will send you your hundreds of gigabytes of backed up data on a hard drive in a perfect match to your folder structure as it was on your original disk?

And the postscript for those curious about one Mozy experience, a bit off-topic for this forum, though...

First, let me say I am heartened to see some Mozy folks (Dave DeLong and Mark Suman) knowledgeable about the Time Capsule conflict and posting here, engaged and really trying to help users. Kudos, Mozy. But I'm disappointed with Mozy Support when I went through channels asking about my problems with Mozy corrupting my Time Capsule. As others have reported, I get the "Time Machine Error. The backup disk image could not be mounted." I had just started with two paid accounts with Mozy. Wow, what an introduction to a new service. I included links to other users' dialogues about the problem, including some discussions.apple.com chatter.

From Tech Support on Aug. 16 I got a swell response, "We’re sorry about the trouble some of you ran into with this latest version. We’re working quickly to get this issue resolved and expect to release the fix soon." Helpfully adding, "If you uninstall Mozy and reboot, you should be able to use Time Capsule as before. " Of course, this missed the point that in my request for assistance I started off by noting that I had already uninstalled Mozy. Did you notice I said this email came Aug. 16?

I referred my new Tech Support friend Mubarak to the Aug. 13 Mozy blog entry about new v.1.4.3 that provided a link to the "fix" that already had been released supposedly resolving the Mozy conflict with Time Capsule. You can't expect the tech support folks to keep up on their releases. To his credit, I did get a friendly acknowledgement to my rude missive, a promise two days ago to elevate my inquiry, with no further Mozy response. I understand that I'm asking them about an Apple equipment problem, but darn it, their software caused it. I'm just a little tiny user, two paid accounts, but I think maybe I was wise to go month-to-month and not fall for those discounts with the annual subscription.

MB332LL/A - 24-in. 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Aug 19, 2009 7:12 PM

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8 replies

Aug 25, 2009 11:24 AM in response to terry999

Terry,

I know you didn't have a good experience with Mozy, but I wanted to comment on being "just a little tiny user, two paid accounts." We take our Home customers very seriously. You are our bread-and-butter. We have made changes across three departments to help avoid situations like this again. I know it doesn't help you now, but I thought you'd like to know.

And if you wanted to cancel your account with Mozy, we will certainly give you a per-month, pro-rated refund regardless of whether you sign up for the monthly or yearly billing. You do have to contact us for that, but we won't hassle you about it.

Now it seems I should get back to work fixing our software. 🙂

Dan Reese
Mac Dev Lead, Mozy

Aug 28, 2009 8:20 AM in response to terry999

Followup note. In addition to giving Mozy credit for expressions of concern from Dan Reese in this thread, I note that after a few days, Mozy did redirect my request to another support rep. The support folks never did spend any time on my concern, which was salvaging my Time Capsule (not learning how to reinstall Mozy). At one point, after one of many reboots I was able to mount the Time Capsule and run Disk First Aid on the disk image, ran Disk Warrior, and somewhere along the line my Time Capsule went back to normal, operating without data loss. (No Mozy running at this time.)

I know I am expecting a lot thinking Mozy should offer aid to the "The backup disk image could not be mounted" Time Capsule problem when it persists after the Mozy uninstall, reboots, etc. I imagine some good ultimately will come from the problem, in that I suspect that the next time they are testing out an upgrade before release, they will try it out in some test configurations that include Time Capsule. It could conceivably have some new bizarre conflict, as software sometimes will, but I bet it will work with Time Capsule.

Still hoping for a service and/or Apple enhancement that will run join a cloud backup service with Time Machine software; and second on the wish list, that for a couple hundred bucks after your crash they'll FedEx you a hard drive with an exact duplicate of your drive(s) with ALL the files as of the last Time Machine backup.

Sep 7, 2009 7:43 AM in response to brsnyder

All of the email addresses go to the same place. The different recipients just help our Support team categorize things better.

I'm pretty sure Support has been swamped because of a glitch in one of our data centers causing backups to fail unexpectedly (not a data loss issue). A refund won't be a problem though.

As an alternate, you could try http://twitter.com/mozy or http://www.facebook.com/mozybackup.

I'm sorry about things taking so long. If you don't hear back this week, send me a note (dan at mozy dot com) on Friday and I'll go talk to the refund guys in person. 🙂

Sep 13, 2009 5:54 PM in response to terry999

For those who may belated stumble into this thread and have similar questions about cloud alternatives, I found an interesting comparison article at: http://theappleblog.com/2009/07/16/mozy-vs-carbonite-mac-backup-smackdown/

And with a little more research, I did find that a service mentioned in some posts related to the above review, Blackblaze, does prominently advertise a $189 restore option to a USB drive, which was one of my dreams... see:
https://www.backblaze.com/internet-backup.html
Like Mozy, it has exceptions... "backs up everything on your computer except your operating system, applications, temporary files, or those over 4GB." Hmmm... I wonder if a few of my Final Cut Pro projects exceed 4GB? Like Mozy, it will will let you include physically attached external hard drive. Yay.

Because it requires Intel Macs, I'm thinking that I may keep Mozy for one of my laptops, but switch my main iMac network server to Blackblaze. I've been having problems with Mozy on the laptop, though -- it just stops backing up and doesn't alert me (log shows repeated "churn is not running" and "Could not load version info from server: Error NSUnknownErrorDomain 7." Not very user friendly info. I'll still hold out hope that Apple may do something with Time Machine that would make it easy for vendors to provide a Time Machine compatible service that would integrate seamlessly and adjust fees for all the applications and other memory hog files it would otherwise exclude. I really don't want to have to learn what Mozy churn is, not that my Time Capsule gives me much user-friendly log detail.

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After Mozy's Time Capsule fiasco, looking for cloud alternative

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