When Poor Help Files Meet Great Tech Support

Yesterday, our company purchased Mozy Pro to help us with our daily backups. We have a database file, a few gigabytes big, that’s important to have a daily backup of. Instead of backing it up to tape and worrying about bringing a tape home every day, Mozy automatically uploads the changes made to the file.*

So I was fairly dissapointed when I came in today and was greeted by a “disk full” error. I have several hundred gigabytes free on the drive I am backing up from, and a few gigabytes on the operating system drive, so I wasn’t sure exactly what the problem was. I clicked the error for more details, and was greeted with a screen that said the error was unknown.

The error was unknown? First of all, if the program generates an error, it should never be considered unknown. Second of all, this was a disk full error, which should be one of the most common errors a user could encounter. So why was there not more documentation on this?

I grudgingly picked up the phone (I learned long ago that emailing support at companies was useless if you wanted a response back anytime soon) and called their support number. I was greeted by a menu system, pressed a button, and immediately heard ringing. Then just a few seconds later, a support technician picked up.

Well this is a good start, I thought. I explained the error to the technician, who immediately recognized the problem and told me the cause (Mozy uses the temporary directory on the main partition on my server, which does not have much space free). Then in about thirty seconds he stepped me through changing the temporary directory. I thanked him and hung up.

In about two minutes, I had reached Mozy and fixed my problem. Very impressive, so much so that I forgave them for their lackluster help file - though I did make a suggestion to put what the technician had told me directly into that help file.

* at least, theoretically. Right now it’s backing up the entire file every night, which is horrible since the file is 3 gigabytes but the changes are only a few megabytes. Let’s hope Mozy fixes this problem as well as they did the previous one.