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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.

October 29, 2007 · Filed under technology

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.

David said,

June 14, 2008 @ 4:07 pm

I’ve been using Mozy for about 6 months and I now officially HATE it. I had to do a PC Restore on my machine due to some windows problems, so I figured I would be fine because all my files are backed up on Mozy. So I’m done with the restore (to factory settings) and I’m ready to get my files from Mozy. Only when I go to their website to do a Web Restore, I get this error message EVERY SINGLE TIME:
—————————————–
There was an error while restoring.

There was an error processing your restore request. Please try again later.

Try to restore again
—————————————–

I’ve been trying for hours now. And this isn’t the first time this happened to me. A couple of months ago I tried to restore and I had the same problem. I eventually gave up and got the files off of my wife’s computer, where I had still had them backed up from before using Mozy.

So yeah, their service seems great when you first start using it. Nice little program, runs automatically, etc. But if you need to actually restore your files, WATCH OUT. It might take a LONG time. Oh yeah, and they don’t have live tech support either. You have to e-mail and then wait…………probably until the next business day. I’m definitely canceling my subscription after I get my data back. I’ll try somewhere else next time, or back up to an external drive and keep it offsite.

Todd said,

August 12, 2008 @ 2:31 pm

I’ve been using MozyPro with no problem at all.

Mozy will be doing lots of reads and writes when performing a backup. Was Mozy performing a backup, when all this was going on?

I set mine to run at 2AM. But clearly, if you are trying to work on the computer, and do a backup at the same time, you will get performance problems.

Peter said,

October 23, 2008 @ 11:20 pm

I agree. Mozy KILLS your performance.

I wanted to use Mozy to backup my software that I write for my work (in a subversion repository). I also build my software on the same system. Normally I can build it in about 5 minutes, with Mozy the whole things times out after 35 minutes!

After removing it was back to normal. Then I tried again, set the schedule to be at midnight but even without any backups running the build time went up again.

Basically, Mozy can work if you do not have any processes running that perform a lot of disk access, if you do, you better forget about Mozy.

bryan said,

March 1, 2009 @ 12:49 am

same problem… after establishing a backup every time i opened a folder of even 15 image files windows came to a grinding halt. for as long as 20-30 seconds. their tech people said it was my antivirus and firewall. wrong. as soon as i uninstalled everything sped back up again.

i’m now fighting them for a refund. ugh.

jeff said,

March 6, 2009 @ 8:53 am

Of course your system will be slow when Mozy is backing up, why is this a surprise? It’s sucking files off of your system as fast as your internet connection will let it. Also, Mozy tech support is correct about your A/V making it worse. Modern A/V solutions scan in real time reads and writes to the disk. Since Mozy is cranking your disk, your A/V is going crazy trying to scan every byte getting read. Re-install Mozy and disable real-time scanning (or setup folder exclusions for the folders you are backing up). Also, set it it run in the middle of the night. Still, I have Mozy cranking out 2 m/bs on a dual core machine right now with 4gb of RAM and I can’t even tell it’s running.

Herman said,

March 13, 2009 @ 12:58 pm

I’ve seen the performance reduction issues running on a P4 with 1 GB ram. The issue seemed to get worse the more I had backed up. (or maybe it was the more I had SELECTED to back up) Anyway, I have over 300 GB backed up (took five months) and the performance of the machine is acceptable after making some changes to the client settings.

I have the following two settings checked (on the options tab) which improved my performance:

1. Disable icon overlays in Windows Explorer.
2. Don’t show virtual drive in My Computer.

Also, since I have so many files backed up, the configuration screen takes a long time to open up. I don’t think there is a fix for this since it has to read a lot of data.

My PC is now dead and I am building a replacement. The motherboard and one of the hard drives are fried. I got most of my data back from Mozy with the exception of a few large (18GB) video files which are taking days to download. (I have them on the original mini dv tape anyway) Without Mozy, I would have lost about six months worth of non-replaceable personal photos.

I will be installing Mozy on the new machine and contacting them to sync up the files from the old backup to the new PC. I’ve read it can be done. If not, I’ll consider a new backup strategy.

SImon said,

April 7, 2009 @ 10:18 am

I’ve done as Herman suggested and it’s restored the speed of my system to normal. I think the problem has been Mozy searching to see if any icons needed updating in the folder.

Ed said,

April 10, 2009 @ 4:54 pm

I have experienced the Mozy slowness first hand. Like the other post, it took me forever to figure out that Mozy was the culprit. My PC was extremely slow and couldn’t figure out why. I keep a detailed Change Control Log of my PC, maybe because I’m an admin. The funny thing was that Mozy worked fine off the bat, it didn’t slow the system until several weeks later, so I didn’t think it was Mozy at first. The I/O Reads and Writes gave it away. As soon as I uninstalled Mozy, performance returned. And yes, I tried everything prior to uninstalling Mozy, Firewall, A/V, schedule at 1am, blah, blah. I am now happily running CrashPlan without any performance issues.

Wish Mozy could have figured out my issue as I WAS HAPPY:(

Matthew Dornquast said,

April 13, 2009 @ 3:31 pm

Jeff,

re>Of course your system will be slow when Mozy is backing up, why is this a surprise?

Because it doesn’t have to be that way. Backup should “get out of the way” when you need your system. CrashPlan has several technologies that do this.

CrashPlan can be configured to use 0-100% of your resources (disk I/O & CPU) when you’re using your computer, and 0-100% when you walk away. You can control how much bandwidth you’re giving your backup. You can use QOS flags on TCP packets so it doesn’t interfere with your VOIP traffic.. there are a few examples.

Best of all, with your own destinations, CrashPlan is free.

We also have much better compression than any other online backup product out there.

~Matthew

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