Horrible data recovery experience and no refund despite broken service
I was a customer of the Mozy cloud backup company that Carbonite recently acquired. After running into the issues described below and requesting a refund of my 2 year subscription renewal fee (successful backups only occurred for 5 days after the renewal), Mozy was not responsive and Carbonite was unable to help. Read on for details...
My subscription was renewed for 2 years about 3 months ago. I didn't realize until about a month ago when my computer crashed and the hard drive could not be recovered that the last automatic backup occurred 5 days after the renewal, and there had not been a successful back for the last 2 months despite the software showing that backups were occurring. I spent hours trying to work with Mozy tech support to recover my data which was encrypted with my custom key, because their normal recover procedure wasn't working. The first support tech was useless. The next few were better, but neither they nor the manager who I asked to follow up with me could do anything to actually help.
I figured out on my own that I had to painstaking download all of my files in chunks less than 5GB at a time, to avoid the "large download" threshold that wasn't allowing decryption to work. Then I would unzip the download and run the decrypt tool in the Mozy client software. This was the only way to decrypt the files - the online decryption tool didn't work.
I ran into another issue where various files of different types and in different locations would be listed in Mozy as both a file and an empty folder with the same name, and if I downloaded and unzipped the parent folder only the empty folder would get downloaded. I had to find and manually download and decrypt each of these files one-by-one, which was a major pain.
The entire recovery process was horrendous, and in the end even though I was able to recover everything that was actually backed up (with great effort, and almost no useful help from Mozy) I still ended up with 2 months of lost data.
Given my situation, I respectfully requested a full refund of my last renewal fee. I made this request both in the feedback form when I cancelled my Mozy subscription, and via email to the Mozy manager that had reached out to me. I never heard back from anyone, so I reached out to Carbonite customer support. They were unable to do anything other than to say that I needed to talk to Mozy customer support. I couldn't even do that because their support phone line requires a support ID which I don't have, and I could no longer access their online chat support because I had cancelled my subscription.
With no other options, I've given up on Mozy or the company that just acquired them, Carbonite, actually doing the right thing and giving me a refund. I would advise others to be wary of working with Carbonite. The experience will likely be good until something goes wrong with your data, and then good luck working with customer service if and when you have trouble recovering your data.







