WARNING: Mozy May Kill Your System’s Performance

A 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.