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WARNING: Mozy May Kill Your System’s Performance

Mozy slowA little while back I installed Mozy, the much touted online backup service. I thought I had found the perfect automatic data backup system, and even gave it a favorable review earlier this year.

However, over the past few months I had noticed that my computer was getting really slow. At first I thought it may have been Firefox and/or the numerous addons I have running. Then I thought maybe it was some other software that was using up all my memory.

The computer started coming to a grinding halt - so much so that it really started to impact my work. I had to take an afternoon off and to start searching for what was causing this slowdown. I went through all my start programs, disabled everything one by one, and tried to track memory and CPU usage of everything I had running. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

I asked Duane to help me diagnose the problem and help me find the culprit. He tweaked my Windows Task Manager to also show I/O reads and writes (hard drive access), and sure enough Mozy was prectically choking my hard drive, reading/writing to it non-stop - far more so than any other program.

I shut down and disabled the service, but even after restarting I still found mozybackupservice.exe running in my task tray - it was a pesky little program that just wouldn’t go away. I had to unistall and delete everything associated with Mozy before I had my computer’s performance back. Sure enough, afterwards my system was back to its old fast self.

So be forewarned: Mozy may be the Techcrunch darling, but it’s a pesky little piece of software that may very well kill your hard drive’s (and your computer’s) performance.

Missy Caulk said,

November 20, 2007 @ 7:04 am

Really, I’ve been running it for awhile and have not had any problems. Thanks for the heads up if I start running slow, but I really like it. What back-up program did you go to then?

Markus said,

November 20, 2007 @ 10:24 am

I haven’t replaced it yet. I’m considering Carbonite but for now I’m just making manual backups.

Bucky said,

December 6, 2007 @ 1:16 pm

Very informative post. By the way, how do you tweak Windows Task Manager to show I/O read and writes?

Bucky said,

December 6, 2007 @ 1:36 pm

I should have STFI first. =p

Ctrl+Alt+Del > Task Manager
Processes tab
View > Select Columns

John said,

February 12, 2008 @ 8:15 pm

I’ve discovered the same thing about Mozy. It took me forever to figure out which program was causing my computer to crawl. I’m looking into other options now. I’ll miss the Mozy price, but I’ve lost a lot more money in productivity.

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