Is MozyHome Remote Backup known to slow down Windows Explorer?

Question

Windows Explorer on my home machine is uber slow, and I suspect it is Mozy's fault. In the past Mozy has done some goofy stuff like placing file and folder icon overlays in Windows Explorer, which was really bugging me because I thought they were from TortoiseSVN (and I had uninstalled that!). Anyhow, does anyone else have Mozy installed? Is Windows Explorer really slow respond for you, say when you simply double click the hard drive to browse files? I'd also welcome any tips people might have on debugging why Windows Explorer might be slow (shell extensions known to cause problems, etc.).

Answer 1

I couldn't find any reference to Mozy being a reason for system slow down.

If you aren't willing to try and see if Mozy is the problem then at least I can't provide you an answer, though I find it highly unlikely that Mozy itself is the problem.

Answer 2

I run Mozy Home on a Windows XP SP3 machine with no obvious impact on Windows Explorer performance, even without selecting the Mozy configuration option to disable "icon overlays in Windows Explorer". I did have to throttle the bandwidth Mozy used to prevent it impacting the performance of other Internet applications (though most of these are mainly downloading data they do, of course, need uplink bandwidth to send commands and ACKS and there was a distinct drop in performance when Mozy filled the uplink bandwidth). Whilst I would be uncertain of the mechanism it could be that this network impact on other applications could cause sluggishness in applications that are not directly using the network (the link would be more obvious if Windows Explorer is slow accessing network-connected resources). So I would recommend trying Mozy with

(a) the current version (I am using 1.14.0.6 but the current version is, I think, 1.14.1.6).

(b) icon overlays disabled, as suggested by others, (this setting, as with the next two is on the 'option' tab from 'configure')

(c) bandwidth throttled to, say, half the available uplink bandwidth (and remember that if you are using an asymmetric service such as ADSL this will be a lot lower than the downlink bandwidth)

(d) backup speed set to minimum (Mozy recommend three-quarters for typical use but a minimum setting should eliminate doubt).

and then see whether these change the performance of your system.

A further test might be to suspend Mozy (right click on the system tray icon for this option).

Beyond that would need consideration of the whole system: operating system and other application versions and patches, other running processes, resource availability, virus/trojan/rootkit checks, benchmarking and so on. You don't say which operating system and hardware you have or what else you are running on it when Windows Explorer seems slow so I can't comment further.

Answer 3

I used Mozy for a while and definitely noticed a performance hit on the system in general, even with icon overlays disabled. I found Carbonite to have much less of an impact on system performance, but it has its own quirks and annoyances.

To diagnose your performance issues, I would recommend running Process Explorer from the Sysinternals folks (now owned by Microsoft). This will show you, among many other things, what programs are hogging the CPU. Process Monitor, also from Sysinternals, can also be quite helpful in diagnosing system slowdown issues.

Note that you can run these tools "live" without installing them to your machine. Here are the links to running them directly from the Sysinternals Live site:

• Process Explorer
• Process Monitor

Answer 4

No performance hit on my Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit machine.

I do, however, sometimes have noticeable lag while my antivirus is enabled. Quite a common unwanted feature of antivirus software is a momentary delay in display the contents of folders while it is doing a quick scan beforehand.

Have you tried disabling your antivirus to see if that is the root of your performance issues?

Answer 5

I use Mozy (as of writing this version 1.14.1.6) and do not find it to slow Explorer.

Have you tried disabling icon overlays? There's a setting to do so in the Options tab of the configuration dialog. It's the 9th tickbox from the top.

Answer 6

It has no performance effect on my XP system with icon overlays disabled.

Answer 7

Take a look through Process Monitor at the file manifest.dat.1 which resides in Program Files MozyHome Data. It can reach 100s of Mb. I guess this is Mozy database of file status. It seems that each time you open a new folder in Explorer, Mozy's dll will crunch that file to see how to display the folder items icon. I haven't yet find the solution to bring most of my explorer performances but Defrag & Contigu tools on this file helps. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 8

I use MozyHome version 1.16.1.3 on WinXP-SP3 and it appears that the program sometimes grinds my hard-drive excessively. Using the windows TaskMan I can see that MozyHome appears to copy large amounts of data (I've seen up to 25GB read and 17GB written), before anything is actually sent over the network to the backup server. At one time I also noticed that the memory use of the mozybackup.exe was >1.3GB. I think the current way that MozyHome checks for changed files to backup in large backup sets (I currently backup ~150k files ~110GB) causes excessive harddisk access, at least because no similar slowdown is observed when I use CrashPlan to backup the same set of files instead.

I recommend using CrashPlan instead. Even though the throughput to the CrashPlan server is somewhat slower than to the Mozy Server, the Crashplan applications spends less time preparing for backup ("Reticulating Splines") than Mozy. Just my 2cents

Answer 9

Mozy has definitely slowed down my vista system. It turns out it's the "MozyHome Remote Backup Shell Extensions" that's causing my problem. I followed the steps given here (http://www.watchingthenet.com/how-to-fix-slow-right-click-problems-in-windows.html), and found that by disabling "MozyHome Remote Backup Shell Extensions" - my slow right-click problem immediately goes away.

Answer 10

I installed Mozy last summer and immediately Windows Explorer became all but unusable. It would crash, it would take minutes to display the contents of a folder, blank the window and use all the cpu resources any time you switched to another window and then back, and sometimes do this several times in a row.

I uninstalled Mozy at that time, and the problem immediately went away.

I installed Mozy a few weeks ago again, and the problem with Windows Explorer happened again. Long periods of 100% cpu usage, unexplained "blank" window refreshes, minutes (instead of sub-second) to display the contents of a folder.

I have large numbers of files in a very large number of directories. Normally Windows Explorer has little trouble, and may only pause for a maximum of 1-2 seconds to display even the biggest of them. With Mozy installed, Windows Explorer regularly crashes and restarts or the window just "disappears" from the active windows with no error message.

I contacted Mozy to ask about this and some other problems (no visibility on what has been backed up and what has not, conflicting statistics from different screens within Mozy, failure of the web interface to display files backed up, etc.) and after some time of really avoiding the questions I was asking, or even saying yes, thats a known problem, the representative finally said that Mozy 2.0 was coming out "soon." Once he had said that, he basically admitted that many of the features don't work, or work incorrectly. He claimed that the Windows Explorer interface to the Mozy servers showing files backed up works 100% (although the legend for a directory which says whether the files are backed up fully or not gives a misleading indicator.)

I am not so sure about any of it now. I am still waiting for my "initial" backup to complete (its about 1/2 done after a month.)

Unknown date for Mozy 2.0 to be released. Windows Explorer interface that crashes this core part of Windows. Un-reliable statistics about backed up files. Inconsistent interfaces to backed up data.

I really wonder if Mozy is the right choice or whether I should be paying more for something that actually works. Uber-Slow. Yes, that's the right term.

Answer 11

Seems to hog all my CPU power when encoding large files prior to backup. I'm going to play with the "Faster Computer / Quicker Backups" slider - although they don't tell you what that actually does. I'm also going to exclude all raw video files from the backup system as video editing swamps it so nothing ever backs up properly.

I think when handling a lot of data, local NAS backup might be more appropriate.