I finally decided to dive in with an online backup of my files. I have two systems that need backups so I decided to use MozyPro as their prices are good and if Hanselman uses them, they can’t be that bad.  My big pain point with online backup is my behemouth .pst files. I have two of them…my working .pst and an archive .pst.  Totaling about 2 GB total, I need a solution that can back up these files without re-uploading the entire file everytime. Mozy promises this…after the first backup.

So I installed it locally and setup the directories and files I wanted backed-up. All seemed good until I started getting a “the C-Drive is out of space” errors.  It seems that Mozy compesses everything locally and will do so without regard to remaining drive space. I had to stop the backup and reboot my machine as Vista was down to 5 Meg free. I didn’t like how it was going about the backup, but I figured i’d live with it. So I opened the configuration to find out where to tell it to create temporary files…nothing…I wrote support and eventually found a listing where it showed me how to change the registry to make this happen.  Huh?  Shouldn’t that be a setting in their long-winded configuration?  Ok, not very professional but I’ll do it.  Restarted the services and went about backing up again…

After a second reboot (for un-related reasons), I couldn’t log on my system. It was complaining that the User Profile couldn’t be loaded.  Wierd sure, but after rebooting a second time I could finally get into my system…but all my settings in my profile were gone.  I did some searching and apparently I am not the first one to see this happen after using Mozy.

That was it…I uninstalled Mozy and cancelled my account.  It shouldn’t be this hard.

For those of you who do get this “User Profiles Cannot Be Loaded” error, this post on Cherry Byte’s blog did the trick:

http://cherrybyte.blogspot.com/2007/07/fixing-user-profiles-in-vista.html