Comments on: WARNING: Mozy May Kill Your System's Performance

By: Shfaxx

Shfaxx — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:37:42 +0000

Had the same performance issues as you guys. I have a Q6600 quad core Vista x64 box w/4GB memory. Here is what I found (Mozy support was useless):

- The Explorer.exe process was using apx 3GB of my 4GB of memory causing everything to page out and bring the system to a crawl.
- Mozy created 25,000 – 30,000 temp fiels in C:\Windows\Temp
- Once all the system memory was used the backups would stall and whatever Mozy was trying to do would also come to a crawl.
- Mozy support had no clue, I provided all these details and screen captures and they had NOTHING to say. Mozy finally finished doing whatever it was doing and things are back to normal (The temp files are gone).

- As per your guys suggestion I’ve now turned off the icon notifications, I’ll see how that goes.

I have 2.2TB of data and 700,000+ files.

By: Emanuel Moecklin

Emanuel Moecklin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:51:25 +0000

My computer got really slow whenever I opened explorer a couple of times. With Task Manager, Resource Monitor and Process Monitor I tried to figure out what is going on. Basically explorer used more and more memory the more it was used and didn’t release the memory after closing. Initially it used around 200mb (already a lot!) but after opening the first explorer window it used >500mb, then after closing and reopening 700-900mb, then >1gb. After disabling “Show backup status icon on files and folders” in Mozy the memory leak disappeared and performance was back where it should be. Thanks to Herman ;-).
Btw it wasn’t necessary to disable Mozy’s virtual drive.

By: SD

SD — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:21:05 +0000

I have been running Mozy for about 6 months and have gradually seen my laptop performance degrade. It took me a while to find the reason since I did not initially suspect Mozy. I have my system configured to backup once per week (on Sunday – it is now Wednesday). In fact, if I look at the configuration window, I actually have backups temporarily disabled.

However, I am currently running a process monitor, and Mozy is the MOST ACTIVE process on my machine and appears to be running through every file in the backup set. Why is this process even active? I have no backup scheduled for another 4 days.

I agree with previous posters that some degradation in performance is to be expected WHEN A BACKUP IS BEING RUN. However, this program is killing my disk right now and no backup is supposed to be run.

About to uninstall.

By: Laurent Luce

Laurent Luce — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:54:49 +0000

If you are looking for an alternative to Mozy, Carbonite, you can check out our data protection service online at http://www.tomnica.com. Not only does it provide a great backup service, but it also allows you to wipe or encrypt data in case your device gets lost or stolen. Finally, you can monitor your device by using features such as screenshots, webcam image capture and device location tracking. All these services are available in 1 package with a neat web interface. We have a free plan for 1 year. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Laurent Luce
Director of Software
Tomnica, Inc.

By: Performance

Performance — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:35:45 +0000

I’m thinking about getting Mozy and I’m curious: what types of connections do the commenters have? I’m getting Verizon FIOS next week and would like to know how well it will work.

By: Matthew Dornquast

Matthew Dornquast — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:31:52 +0000

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

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:54:38 +0000

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:(

By: SImon

SImon — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:18:21 +0000

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.

By: Herman

Herman — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:58:04 +0000

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.

By: jeff

jeff — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:53:47 +0000

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.