Mozy is an online backup service. They offer 2 GB of free online backup. Sounds sweet. I've been using their services (free edition) for over a year now as my secondary, off-site, backup solution. It worked just fine and I was a happy customer. Until that day.
Mozy upgraded their client and the new version is incompatible with Apple's own Time Machine backup utility which is built in OS X. How incompatible? I am using Time Machine over the local network with my beloved Time Capsule. This is my primary backup. One day, the backup stopped working. I found that the backup image was corrupt. I tried resuscitating it (almost 2 days of disk utility hogging my CPU) but it was just lost. I spent almost a day trying to start a backup from scratch. All my attempts were in vain.
Eventually, I googled a few messages from the Console which led me to some forum discussions. Reading through them I found out that it was Mozy's fault. I uninstalled Mozy and my Time Machine is now running smoothly. My previous image with a year of backups, is gone for good.
I'm a software developer so I know that bugs happen. I'm not angry at Mozy for having bugs. Sure, I would expect a higher level of testing, after all having a Time Capsule is very common among backup-conscious Mac Users. But I can understand that this might happen. What I cannot accept is that Mozy knew about it and kept quite.
Backup is a crucial business service for me. I need my service provider to be 100% trust worthy. This means being transparent and forthcoming. Mozy lost my trust.
There's a lesson to learn here. Following the twitts and forum posts regarding Mozy (they don't keep a forum of their own) it's clear that I'm not the only one and they are bleeding. Bugs happen. The best thing you can do is fix them and issue an update on the spot. The least you should do is alert your customers even at the price of bad PR. Customer service is the key to viral marketing and the damage caused by negative viral reactions may be more expensive. Or is it?
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