When something goes wrong with that, customer service likes to send you in a round robin of ridiculous requests — I guess in the hope that you just give up and go away.

It can take weeks to get even seemingly minor issues resolved as it takes so long for them to reply (often with nonsense).

Now, I’m far from a Mac expert, so this might be a simple matter of changing a preference somewhere. But if it is, I can’t find it — and I’m surprised Mozy tech support wouldn’t know about it, since I can only imagine that every single Mac user must raise a stink about this every time they try to restore…

Say the restore generates three archives that each contain part of a tree of files, that are all under a top-level folder called “C”…

If you unpack each archive into a different place, it will create three C folders. You should be able to drag all three into one single place.

At this point, Windows will ask you if you want to merge the folders. Say yes and job’s done.

I’m assuming that it’ll be called something other than “C” in MacOS, but you get the idea.

Looking around now, I do see various Mac apps available online that would let me “compare and merge” files, but most seem to cost money. Maybe I should ask Mozy to buy me one…

As for client restore, in the interest of brevity I cut out my discussion of how that went. Namely, the client restore wouldn’t show me all of my files, even when I selected the “all files” version. At first, I thought I had solved this when I went back a version or two and found what looked like everything. But as many accounts online relate, restoring by this process eventually froze and I had to try to start over. When I did, I could no longer see all of my files again, even if I went back to the exact same version that had had all of them before. VERY queasiness-inducing… When I asked tech support, they told me to do a web restore, even though the Mozy site says the client restore is the preferred option.

Mozy had some serious issues last year — growing pains, I think. These caused me to angrily cancel my two-year account, demanding and getting a full refund.

However, after having tried countless competitive services, I was persuaded to come back to Mozy, partly via public mea culpae from Mozy employees. The story was that the issues had been solved and everything now works as it should.

So far so good. and, yes, I’ve done some extensive recovery testing.

Anyway, so i read your blog post again, and it struck me that your issue seems to come from an inability to “merge” several partial restores. When you do a large Mozy web restore, the files are distributed “randomly” across the various archive files.

Once you’ve downloaded them, you would normally want to merge the contents of the archive files into one, coherent tree.

Of course, this tweakery is only necessary if you choose to do a Web restore (as opposed to a client restore). Sadly, I often hear people complain that the client restore doesn’t always work reliably.