So I’ve been using Mozy for a little over a month now, and so far I’m pretty pleased with it. It did take a while to do the initial backup, but that’s to be expected – I do have a lot of data to back up!
I liked the fact that I could schedule Mozy to run at “reduced speed” during the work day when I’m using my computer – that was, in fact, a deal-buster. I need all of my bandwidth when I work!!
That said, there was one minor annoyance with Mozy – although I didn’t realize it was Mozy at first.
I had noticed that when I selected several files in Windows Explorer, and went to right-click them, Explorer would freeze up for up to 30 seconds. At first I just thought it was because the files I was currently selecting were on a remote server, but later I noticed the same thing was happening with local files as well.
Well, I’m no stranger to troubleshooting strange things in Windows, so I broke out some tools – namely, Process Monitor and Process Explorer. With these two tools, I was able to see that… Explorer was taking a long time to process my request. Digging in a little bit deeper, I saw that it was a shell extension to Explorer that was consuming all the time. Tracking it down was a little tricky since I’d never done shell extensions, but eventually the trail lead to… Mozy.
OK, so Mozy is slowing things down. I could understand why – whenever I opened the configuration screen for Mozy, it always took forever to open. I don’t know why, but I can guess – it’s connecting to the on-line service and reading a whole bunch of stuff, both from the on-line service and from my computer (presumably refreshing the list of files to be backed up, which is quite extensive). Now, why it was doing this when I right-clicked I don’t know – after all, I don’t know how their shell extension is written – but at least I knew what was causing the problem. Now I just needed to figure out how to fix it.
A quick web search didn’t turn up much, but there were a few hints about other people having the same problem, and a solution that was mentioned, but wasn’t explained.
To save people the trouble of hunting for the answer, I’ll just come out and say it. I found the setting that needs to be turned off after digging around a bit – basically, you turn off the shell extension feature of Mozy. While this might be a turn-off for some, for me it’s not a big deal. I don’t need to restore files often enough that I’d need a shell extension for it.
You can find the option by right-clicking your Mozy icon and choosing “Configure.” Then, click on the “Options” tab and check “Don’t show restore menu in Windows Explorer.” For good measure, I also checked “Don’t show MozyHome Remote Backup virtual drive in My Computer.”
After making those two changes, the problem went away – my right-clicks on multiple files were as speedy as ever. And I don’t miss the functionality I turned off, so it’s all good for me!
Hopefully this will help other people who’ve experienced the same symptoms. And perhaps Mozy will figure out why it slows down so much and fix the problem – though I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that it might not be easy – or even possible, given the circumstances. But oh well.
If you’re interested in my earlier post on Mozy, click here.
