Fixing MozyPro – Won’t Backup / Database Disk Image Malformed

MozyPro is a increasingly popular cloud backup application provided by Mozy.  And with applications that individuals and businesses heavily rely on, such as backup applications, it can be a nightmare when they go wrong!

In this tutorial we’re going to troubleshoot one of the common problems that users of MozyPro experience.  This problem involves MozyPro not actually backing up any files but still showing (and, actually ‘performing’) each backup of 0 files successfully, despite files changing.  Please also be aware that MozyPro is also marketed as MyBusinessWorks in the UK – both MozyPro and MyBusinessWorks are, essentially, the same program, so this tutorial applies to both.

Now firstly, most users of MozyPro should notice that there are at least some files to backup at each scheduled backup point.  Unless you’re backing up very little or files that aren’t changed regularly only, you’re likely to notice that even a few minutes after backup, new files are showing as pending for the next backup.

Now, you can open up MozyPro / MyBusinessWorks preferences (or click on the taskbar / menu icon) to see how many files are awaiting backup:

If 0 files is showing, this could be an indication that there is a problem with your backups.

However, to verify this we need to look at the logs.  You can select the ‘History’ button from the MozyPro preferences pane:

Here you’ll be presented with the logs window with details of all your recent backups:

Now you need to look back at your recent backups – have any failed?  Or have any succeeded but backed up 0 files?  If you spot one that has, check the backups for the days immediately prior to that, are they also the same?  If so, you’ve probably got a database malformed / caching issue.

MozyPro creates a cache of your backups (sometimes fairly extensive), however if this cache becomes malformed (corrupted) it usually means disaster for MozyPro – it can’t fix it or alert you to the problem, because as far as the application is aware, it’s working fine – you just have nothing to backup.

It’s a fairly safe bet that by this point, having analysed your backup history, that you’ve got a problem with the cache / database malformed.  There’s no harm in deleting the cache (the only affect is that MozyPro will take a while to scan your files again when it next starts scanning for files – please note deleting the cache does not delete any of your files!) so theres perfectly good reason at this point to delete it but….

If you want to do further investigation to confirm the problem – you can look at the log files.  These are in /Library/Logs or you can navigate to them through ‘Console’.  Your log should be named either MozyPro.log or MyBusinessWorks.log (or something very similar).  You may see other ‘numbered’ logs such as MozyPro1.log or MyBusinessWorks1.log – you can ignore these for our purposes at the moment, these are just the previous logs (‘backup’ logs if you like) that have been created as the logs have been rotated.  The current log will not have a number appended on the end.

Look at the current log – do you see any errors?  Specifically do you see any errors containing “Failed to get files to backup: database disk image is malformed”.  If so, there’s a problem with the MozyPro cache.  But don’t worry, this is simple to fix.

Navigate to /Library/Cache/ and delete the MozyPro/MyBusinessWorks folder contents in there.  If you don’t like messing around in the /Library/ files then its perfectly fine to use an application such as CleanMyMac and get it to scan the caches and remove at least the entries for MozyPro/MyBusinessWorks.

After this your problems are nearly solved.  Reboot your machine and upon the next startup you will notice that MozyPro/MyBusinessWorks is scanning for files – and if you’ve got it set to backup a reasonable amount of files, it’ll like show that it is ‘Scanning Files’ for a fairly long period of time – don’t worry, this is normal, it’s rebuilding the cache we deleted.

After it’s finished scanning the files (and rebuilding the cache) you should notice that everything has gone back to normal and new files are showing awaiting backup (assuming that you do actually have changed files to backup!).  Wait for the next backup (or start a manual one) and you should notice that your backups are functioning correctly again.

And voila, you have a working MozyPro/MyBusinessWorks application again! :).