Strike One Against Mozy – Re-Upload After Re-install of Windows?

Maybe I did something wrong. But I don’t think so.  I’ve been using Mozy since the end of July, and this past week I’ve figured out one pretty significant problem with the system. When I re-installed Windows, I had to complete a new initial upload.

From time to time, I find it helps to re-install Windows, clean up the computer, and start from scratch. This gets rid of programs that have been partially uninstalled and left digital litter all over your registry. Although there’s software to try to do this type of clean up, I don’t think anything quite stands up to starting from a fresh slate.

So, I backed up all my current documents to my external hard drive. I wiped my internal hard drive, re-installed windows, reloaded the documents, and reloaded my essential applications.

When I re-installed the Mozy home software, it didn’t seem to realize that it had already backed up gobs of stuff. The stuff was still there. If Iwent to the restore option, I could sift around my online backup and see my Z drive (the external hard drive). But, when I set it up to back up the same Z drive, it calculated that I had to upload some 300gb of data to back it up.

I followed what would have been a logical path for maintaining the backup without having to re-upload anything. The data is stored on an external hard drive. After re-installing Windows, I mapped that hard drive to the same drive letter (Z). None of the files had been modified, since they hadn’t been moved from the external hard drive, so they shouldn’t appear to Mozy to need to be uploaded over again.

But, for whatever reason, it didn’t think that the current Z drive was the same as the old Z drive so it started uploading stuff all over again. On the one hand, this is not cool because I now have to sit through a week or two of constant uploads. On the other hand, this makes me wonder about the integrity of the files backed up on the server. Is it going to get confused with two identical versions of the files there?