[#1]

I had to replace my hard drive and now Mozy wants to do a full backup, however that is more than 50 GB and it will cost me many $$$ in wireless charges and I want to avoid this. How can I have Mozy just start from the point where I am now? I had to tell Mozy to replace my previous computer on setup since it did not recognize this new hard drive as the same computer.

[#2]

In theory, Mozy only stores one copy of a file. If you upload a file and then I try to upload that same file, I should see an entry in my history that the file was already on Mozy's servers. But I've seen that theory fail many times - even with files that are 4GB in size.

Maybe it will work for you. You should see Mozy encode each file (so that it can send the hash to Mozy's servers), but the app should not transfer each file again.

[#3]

Thank you for your response, but I guess I need some clarification of what Mozy is doing.

I had paused the initial backup when I saw it processing a bunch of files that had already been backed up. The History Report shows the session I paused, with the following information:

45938 files, 41.9GB size, 29 files encoded, 1000.0 MB size encoded, 2 files transferred, and 38.5 KB size transferred

Does that mean that of the first 29 files (before I paused the session) only 2 were sent to Mozy and that instead of 1000.0 MB sent only 38.5 KB were sent?

When I click on that line in the report I get the details in the pane below. This shows a long list of files (does it show all 45938?) with either 0 or a number under Patch Size. Those with a 0 then show Removed (restorable for 30 days) under Other Details.

What is the significance of that info? What does Patch Size refer to? What does Removed mean; are those files removed from my hard disk, from the current Mozy backup set, from the Mozy server, or what? What does Restorable for 30 days mean; will those files no longer be available for restoring after 30 days, or will Mozy automatically back them up again within 30 days so they continue to be available for restoring?

With a 10 GB per month limit on my Verizon data account it would cost me over $400 in overages for Mozy to completely backup all my files again so I obviously want to avoid that!

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Files will be encoded - the resulting hash will be sent to Mozy - if they already have a file with that hash, it should not be transferred. The entry where you saw 1000MB encoded and only a few KB sent - there should have been some comments in the column named "Other Details" telling you that the file was already on Mozy's servers.

The remark "Removed...30 days" means that the file is no longer on your computer (at least not in the exact location (folder structure) that it was the last time you backed it up. The file will be deleted from Mozy's servers in 30 days.

If possible, consider moving the computer to a different location and borrow that internet connection for some of this backup.

[#5]

Thanks; that clarifies a lot!

Actually, I made a connection using my smart phone (HTC Thunderbolt) with PDANet and since I have unlimited Internet for now on it. Would have used it before but it was crashing my laptop until I reinstalled the software at that end. This will allow me to get this first update done with Mozy with no added cost.

[#6]

Congratulations'

I've lost two hard drives since i started using Mozy Pro. In each case Mozy has lost my data.