I’ve decided to follow-the-blog-leader and try out MozyPro for online backup. I set up our account last night (make sure to contact them and get the 10% non-profit discount!) and decided to try out backing up our Exchange/Shelby server first, since that dataset should be a lot smaller than our file server. Everything went smoothly, except that the Exchange Server and SQL Server Backup Sets both showed 0 files, 0 bytes to back up. I figured this was related to Jason’s issue where filesize is not displayed correctly. I included a couple of gigabytes of other files as well, then I started the backup and went home.
This morning, I find the backup complete, and additional incremental backups have also been made throughout the night. However, when looking at the backup history, it shows that the initial backup only transferred 2.2 GB of data — far, far less than our Exchange and Shelby SQL databases! About the size of the other files I’d chosen, in fact.
So, no Exchange or SQL backup happened at all. I called MozyPro’s technical support this morning. They answer the phones quickly, and have escalated the issue to a developer because everything looks like it should be working. I have C, D, and E hard disk partitions on this server, with D containing the SQL installation and database and E containing the Exchange installation and database. It’s all hardware-based SCSI RAID, which looks like regular disks to Windows, nothing special there. Yet for some reason the backup client is not detecting either product for backup. Beyond this issue, I’m happy with MozyPro so far and I’m actual glad I get to test their support early on. I’ve been using Mozy personally for several days at home, and I’ve been very impressed with the free version, and may upgrade to the unlimited version at some point soon!
David,
Please keep us posted when they fix this…I was thinking of trying Mozy for our Shelby data as well. Thanks!
Will do, they sounded like they would get back to me today, but I’m not sure. We also backup Shelby offsite using rotating external USB drives due to the importance of the data. I have a TrueCrypt volume set up on the drive, with autorun and scripts (using robocopy) set up so when you plug in the drive, it prompts you for the TrueCrypt password, and then automatically copies the newest backups to the drive and dismounts the TrueCrypt volume. Plug, type password, wait, unplug. We have two staffmembers that each bring a drive in a backup once a week on different days so one copy is always off site. The benefit is, it’s encrypted and it’s slick enough that anyone on staff can do it! I’ll have to post my batch files sometime.
[…] wrote yesterday that MozyPro wasn’t finding Exchange or SQL files when I selected those backup sets. I called […]
Update posted.
I’d be interested to see the backup scripts you mentioned, to mount your truecrypt drive.
Hi Joe – I’ll see what I can do about cleaning up my scripts, which are pretty basic (but it did take me some time to put them together), and putting them up soon (but no promises on time frame right now). Thanks for your interest!
When restoring, Mozy Pro Can take 24 hours (or more, as I sit waiting at hour 30) on a weekend (weekdays would take longer) to simply GATHER the files that you need to download before you can even start to download them. (50k files or a VERY SMALL server) This makes it worthless for Dr.s lawyers, dentist, hotels,… or anyone who needs their data restored rapidly.
Further, I have been on the phone waiting simply for someone to answer the phone for over an hour so far with no response.