OK...after several rounds of e-mail and chats with Mozy support, I have accepted the fact that if you change OS, you will need to completely re-upload data for back-up. I moved through Kubler-Ross's stages in about a day and a half, but so be it.
Hopefully someone out there will read this and save themselves precious time by accepting this silly fact quicker than I did.
mozy's great until you start getting server errors, or connection errors. At that point, the support staff basically seem to be lost. If you enjoy a lengthy back and forth email relationship with strangers on the other side of the planet, take great pleasure in attaching your mozy log to emails repeatedly, love to reinstall the software over and over, and adore getting emails that do nothing but promise to email you again in 24 hours once the senior technicians have figured out what's wrong, mozy is perfect.
If you actually want a reliable backup service, however.... um....
I've been asking for a refund for 3 days now, but they don't seem to have a sales department.
I realize this is too late for the OP, but for anybody else out there ...
I recently upgraded from XP to Win7, with a Mozy backup of about ~300000 files and ~110GB. I read in some other forums about the synching, and about the fact that when you first start the backups again on the new OS, it appears to be backing up, but supposedly that's just appearances, and that you supposedly need to wait awhile for Mozy to realize that your files are really just in new locations. Here was my experience:
It took 6 full days for the new backup to finish (actually, it stopped w/ just 8 files to go for some reason). While it was going, I saw the Status window read "Transferring: filename" too many times for comfort. When I looked afterwards at the history, though, what apparently happened is:
- Any file above roughly 255kb was recognized by Mozy as already on their servers and was just resynched, not transferred again.
- Any file below below ~255kb was apparently reuploaded. However, that was 233035 files. The total transferred was apparently 29GB, which I think seems right for about 6 days, and which apparently means that I have lots of small files and relatively fewer larger files.
- A good 4-5gb was new files that were in directories that I forgot to exclude when reconfiguring the list of files/directories to back up. Which reminds me:
PIECE OF ADVICE: Before you move from XP to Win7, try to make a list of the directories you're backing up or excluding from backup while still on the old machine. Once you've installed Mozy Home on the new machine, and told it that it's replacing your old one, it's very hard to find a list of which directories you previously had backed up. Since "Documents and Settings" is now "Users", Mozy considers everything in the old file structure to have been deleted (though around for 30 days), and the only way I have found to see a list of deleted files is the online browse/recovery interface, which is not fast, and which requires clicking that inconspicuous "show deleted files" checkbox.
So to sum up: apparently the Mozy people are kind of correct in their claims about files being recognized as already existing on their servers (thus not requiring all files be backed up again from their new location / directory structure), but this apparently only applies to files of a certain size, so still expect for initial setup on the machine to take a while, and for it to appear as though it's doing a full backup again, even though it probably isn't.
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