Mozy Backup goes crazy
I noticed this morning that something had been uploading data overnight. I saw that the Mozy Backup status icon showed it was still running, however, when I checked the status (see below), I was surprised to see that it had decided to try and back up 435GB of data! It is only supposed to back up around 9.3GB of data, so what the hell made it decide to to do that?
Unfortunately, I was unable to find out, because whenever I tried to run the Mozy config, it just sat there and locked up. I had to force-quit it, but something was still hammering the processor. A quick look using ipulse showed it was a process named ‘MozyBackup’. I killed it, but immediately it fired up again. Repeatedly killing it resulted in the same firing up. It was almost behaving like some kind of malware. I ended up rebooting, but it started hammering the processor again, so for the time being, I have had to uninstall Mozy.
Mozy for Mac is currently at 0.9.3.1 and Mozy recently asked its users whether Mozy for Mac was ready for being called version 1. I think this sort of episode shows that they have some way to go.
Update
Following Dan’s Comment below, I have now re-installed Mozy, and he is looking at the log files amongst others to diagnose the problem. I will post back here with the outcome.
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Mac OS X
Hi,
Just saw your comments about your problems with Mozy. First, I want to say that the auto-restart functionality is intentional. We ask OS X’s launchd service to keep Mozy alive. We are trying to avoid a case where a random crash causes your files to stop getting backed up. You can ask launchd to unload MozyBackup, which will stop the process immediately. The exact command is:
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mozy.backup.plist
During the backup process, encrypting files takes quit a bit of processor power. Usually, we can encrypt the files much faster than we can upload them. So we allow ourselves to get a little ahead in the encrypting process, and then wait for the uploading process to catch up. The encrypt process will stay a bit ahead of the upload process the whole time.
The high CPU usage after your reboot sounds like Mozy realized it hadn’t finished the backup and tried to finish up. The high CPU usage shouldn’t have lasted more than few minutes — just enough to get ahead.
However, the other two issues you mention are definite concerns. If you feel up to it, I’d love to have you install the software again and send us a log file.
Regardless, I have added a month of free service to your account by way of apology.
Thanks again,
Dan Reese
Mozy, Inc.