Thought I'd give everyone a quick update on our MozyPro online backup testing.
Well, we learned the hard way that Mozy needs to be installed on a drive that is NOT cramped for space. Even after redirecting Mozy's temp files to a different drive we still had space issues as the app has a couple files in the Mozy folder that track file changes ... and thus these files can get huge!
Of course the day this becomes a critical issue both Ed and I are offsite. So I just told Kyle to do an add/remove of Mozy and kill the Mozy folders until I have a chance to dork with it. So a good week or more went by before I got around to reinstalling Mozy on a different drive. I was pleased that it was smart enough to not need to re-upload all the data it had before the uninstall. It was also now utilizing our full 3Mbps uplink. Thinking it might impact our F1 checkin app for various events, I enabled the bandwidth throttle for 1Mbps max between 8am and 9pm ... and then several days past before I thought to check on it's progress tonight.
The bummer is that in given everything that's happened, I can't give an accurate measure of how long it actually took to sync our 46GB test bed. It was averaging around 4GB/day when I started testing, but I believe that was majorly impacted by multiple variables (like many VM's running on the same box). Once Mozy was clear of VM traffic it was able to hammer our uplink ... my best estimation is that it was then able to average 7.8GB/day.
Mozy's now had 4 days of just syncing the changes to our backup sets ... and it's doing this automatically every 2 hours. It's very interesting to see what's changing on our file server in 2 hour increments ... as expected there's little changing over the weekend and Monday's are a slow day as well. You can also tell who the night owl's are making changes in the wee hours of the morning :-)
Below is a screenshot of the history you can see in MozyPro. I've highlighted the heaviest change period from Monday ... 138.5 MB of changes (should only be block level changes) ... taking 38mins (see prior post on what file types we're actually backing up). The lower window has the details from the highlighted period sorted by transfer time. The hoss of the changes was a whoppin' 91.3MB pdf file ... but it doesn't tell ya how much of the file actually changed ... only that it took 14s to encode and 17.5mins to upload those changes.
So aside from a few snags getting everything uploaded, syncs appear to be crankin' along. As a cheap SMB DR solution I haven't seen anything yet that can touch MozyPro on features and price. If only they would let you pre-populate some sort of media to mail to them prior they'd be golden Jerry, golden ;-)
Of course we may not need a solution like Mozy a few months down the road as we're going to get our wish of having an in town offsite location to backup/replicate to. In the downtown community center that our church has purchased and currently renovating, we have our own server rack closet complete with ventilation, reinforced walls, etc (mad props to our volunteer Tom for making this happen!). Our current thought is to use DoubleTake to replicate ALL our VM's over to this new location ... but I'll save that for another post :-)
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.
Posted by: Pat Siefe | August 04, 2008 at 05:50 PM