Scott Kruger:

It was dark, despite the full moon, as he made his way to the campus library with laptop in hand. The wind blows through the trees lining the walkway. The last remnants of fall clung desperately to the branches silhouetted against the moon as they thrashed about violently. He pulled his jacket up against the chill, trying to warm himself with the knowledge that the only thing left to complete on his final exam paper was the bibliography that he’d fill out upon reaching the library.

The fluttering of a bat in the empty branches above him gave him pause. The noise quickly subsided, and he continued up the walkway toward the lights of the library. Off the path he heard the crunch of leaves. A figure stepped out of the shadows onto the pathway behind him. He looked over his shoulder at the figure. Blood red eyes caught the light of the moon. A fog began drifting in through the woods. He runs toward the lights beyond, dropping his laptop. He leaves it knowing he can recover his paper from the safety of the library. Throwing open the doors he turns around to see wet footprints and nothing more.

D Steinberg:

She was in the middle of reading her friend’s blog when she heard a sound.  It was just after midnight.  Her husband Ed was asleep.  Quietly Judy got up to look around.  The doors were locked, the alarm was on.

“Probably the wind, or a twig brushing against a window,” Judy figured.

Then, suddenly the phone rang.  Who could that be?  Judy answered with growing alarm.  “Oh Judy,” the male voice on the other end of the phone cried out.  “I need help.”

The voice was familiar. “It’s Al.”  “Al Smith,” Judy queried.  Yes, he answered.

“You must come quickly he said.  What’s wrong, Judy asked.  It’s my wife, said Al, now sobbing and noticeably shaken.  What’s wrong with Milly, Judy asked.

Just then Al shrieked and Judy heard a thud as Al’s phone dropped disconnecting the call.  Judy was beside herself.

She woke Ed hysterically, saying “You must go to Al Smith’s house.  Something is wrong with Milly.  I’ll wait here with the kids.  Call me.”  Ed left.   Judy was now alone waiting.

There it was again.. the sound she heard before, now louder and closer.  What had she done?  And who was it really who had called?

David Goldstein:

All was quiet as I finished my term paper, but my blood chilled when a pop-up message appeared on my screen: “MozyHome is protecting your subconscious. Click to view which fears are backed up.” That was replaced a few seconds later with, “One of the fears that paralyzed you in the past
will be restored at midnight.” I sat shuddering in my chair, wondering which of the unbearable possibilities I had pushed to the dark recesses of my mind for self-preservation would be brought to the surface. Would the snake I knew was living in the bathroom sink come out and eat me? Would the nasty e-mail I had thought about writing, and definitely did not write, get “restored” and sent out?
10:30
11:30
12 … “Restoring your fear, please wait … Your fear has been restored successfully. Click to reveal your fear.” I clicked. “Read fault error on drive B: all contents may be lost. Abort, retry, ignore?” Ha ha, boo and pooh to you! My computer doesn’t even have a drive B: Mozy is there for the drives it does have.

Leslie Borghihi:

The laptop sat open on the table I stared in disbelief.  “Account not found.”

“What now?”  I muttered.

I retyped in my login and password, “Account not found.”  I tried another account.  What was going on with this computer?  I restarted it and tried again.  I called tech support.  India did not answer.  Panic was setting in.  I called the bank punched in my account number and password.

The automated voice kindly told me, “We’re sorry unable to authenticate please try again, or press zero for assistance.  Again, no one answered.

I tried my mother.

“Hello, hello, who is this?  I don’t think this is funny.”  The line went dead.

I grabbed my wallet: everything was there.  My door opened, the property owner, and another woman entered.

““We will everything out by Thursday.””

““Great, I’ll take it, where is the previous tenet?””

“Excuse me, I’m right here!”  I shrieked.

“”She died suddenly, no family, and no one she listed as her references knew her.  I assure you we are screening tenets better.””

The two left.

Trying to follow, I found I could not leave the apartment.  The laptop sat open on the table, flashing, “Who are you?”

—

Again, thanks to all who participated. If you submitted a winning story, you will be receiving an e-mail with more information. Happy Halloween!

So, what’s my point? Sometimes even the brightest, most experienced of Mozy customers needs help. That’s where Mozy Support comes in…

How can we help you out?

The table below outlines what support options are available for which products:

If your product is eligible for Phone Support (see the above table!), call us at +1 866-789-6699. Make sure you have your SupportID before calling, because our phone system is going to ask you for it. You can get more thorough instructions on contacting support in our Knowledge Base.

Our Knowledge Base is top-notch, so if you are a tinkerer that would rather do it yourself, that’s the best place to start. You can find it at http://mozy.force.com/support/mozyKnowledgeBase.

Anyway, if you have a question about Mozy or otherwise need some help setting up, backing up or restoring files with Mozy, let us know how we can help!

Be safe,

Craig Cole
Sr. Technical Education Specialist

For those who aren’t familiar with the differences between the two, here they are in a nutshell: hard disk drives or HDDs rely on a moving actuator and a read/write head to read or write data on spinning disks. Solid state drives or SSDs, on the other hand, have no moving parts. In most cases, they rely on NAND-based flash memory.

So, as of today, which technology holds the upper hand for data storage? Have a steaming cup of coffee while I fill you in on the latest.

Which drive can store more for less?

Aside from being more affordable, hard disk drives are still preferred because of their larger storage capacities. But the disparity between their capacities is gradually shrinking.

Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for their price tags. Today, you can find 1 TB hard disks below $100. As for 1 TB solid state drives, you’d be extremely lucky to find one that would cost below $1,000. As a matter of fact, $2,000 to $4,000 pricetags for 1 TB SSDs are quite common.

And by the looks of it, things aren’t going to change much in the near future if we talk about their differences in costs per GB. Some analysts even think they’re going to remain this way for 5-10 years.

Drive Performance

This is where SSDs reign supreme. Because HDDs have to move an actuator arm, read/write head, and disk platters to access data, there’s a substantial delay compared to SSDs. While this may be unnoticeable for regular users, power users – who typically open multiple applications at the same time – will easily see the difference.

Start up, random access, and reading activities are all faster for solid state drives compared to hard disks. Remember those times when you had to defragment your drive to improve performance? This isn’t necessary anymore with solid state drives.

To top it all, an SSD does all this at a lower power consumption rate. Hard disks drain energy faster because some energy has to be allocated for moving the heads and spinning the platters. That’s why computer manufacturers once successfully sold out large quantities of notebooks with SSDs. Some users were attracted to their long battery lives.

Storage reliability issues

Now, what about reliability? In this aspect, which one has a clear advantage over the other? Most businesses – and perhaps even regular users – will prefer a storage device that can offer a better guarantee for the safety of their data

Having a drive with a large capacity or faster performance is great, but if you haven’t backed it up and can’t retrieve any of your data from it again, that’s going to translate to huge financial losses, missed opportunities, and wasted time.

So which technology has the edge in this department? Let’s take a closer look.

HDD Storage Reliability

Theoretically speaking, HDDs are supposed to be more susceptible to failures because of their moving parts. They can also fail for a variety of reasons: head crashes, too high temperature, too low temperature, static electricity, power surges, vibrations, or pollution of the air inside the sealed unit.

Failure rates of different HDDs can be as low as 3% and as high as 13%. As HDDs get older, they suffer from wear-and-tear and hence become more prone to failures; they typically exhibit failure rates of at least 6% for those units that are more than 2 years old.

HDDs can maintain acceptable failure rates only up to 3 years. Beyond that, you’d be exposing your data to high risks. By comparison, SSDs are expected to stay reliable up to 10 years… but again, that’s theoretical.

SSD Storage Reliability

When the netbook craze first started, manufacturers opted to use SSDs was because of their low power consumption and low failure rates during lab tests.

Interestingly, however, their supposed reliability didn’t manifest in the outside world. Failure rates of 10% to 20% were being reported for some netbooks carrying SSDs (many times a SSD can fail due to the controller, not the drive itself). By contrast, netbooks carrying HDDs had failure rates of 2% or less.

Still, because of their relatively higher prices, SSDs haven’t been used as extensively in desktops and servers as HDDs have. Thus, the experience of netbook users can’t be the sole gauge in determining whether HDDs are more reliable.

Summary

What can learned from these figures is that over time, SSDs and HDDs can have failure rates greater than 10%. That’s not good by any standard and that doesn’t bode well for people who rely so much on their data to keep their business running (and in this age, who doesn’t?).

Therefore, regardless what type of drive you use, it is important that you perform regular backups to your data. Just because you have a solid state drive holding your data doesn’t mean it’s safe from failure.

About the Author

Eric Nagel manages OnlineBackupsReview.com where he reviews online backup services, including Mozy, and reports on the latest industry news. He also provides readers an exclusive 15% off Mozy promotional code so they can save on the only 5-star-rated online backup service, Mozy.

But what if you had to hand it over right there, along with all your files, documents, pictures and music that you had stored on it? And what if you then had to smash it to pieces and watch all your work be destroyed right in front of you?

It turns out that mom was right. It really is what’s inside that counts. Our research shows that people in the UK valued their data, on average, at £12,484. Suddenly the swap doesn’t seem such a good idea, does it? Of course, if you’d backed up your data, all you’d be handing over would be worn-out keys and a smudged screen.

Our team in the UK took to the streets of London to tempt a stream of commuters with an incredible offer: a brand-new MacBook – if they smashed up their old laptop right there. Was anyone confident enough in their backup to take our challenge?

Check out what happened in our video:

For more tips, tricks, tutorials, and help with Mozy, go to http://support.mozy.com.

As we move to a digital world where our documents, music, photos, video and personal information is digitized, we reduce our waste and environmental footprint. Unfortunately, all that information can be lost in an instant if our hard drive crashes or if a drink gets spilled on our computers. Just yesterday I received an e-mail from Mark Fuerst who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He told me he accidentally erased his records of his earnings from last year while preparing for this year’s taxes. Within a few minutes, he recovered all his information through his Mozy account. He said both he and his accountant are “eternally grateful.”

So whether you’re backing up online with Mozy or backing up to an external hard drive with an Iomega device, we encourage you to keep your data safe and keep being green.

- Devin Knighton

One takeaway is that while there’s a huge amount of Internet use in China, there aren’t a lot of cloud service providers available. As one of the first cloud providers in China, we’re looking forward to helping millions of Chinese Internet users discover the personal cloud.

The idea to look at our customer’s adoption of Snow Leopard came from Daring Fireball and Macworld. Both collected similar data for their sites. We find it significant that our adoption rate puts the Mozy service closer to the mainstream Mac audience. By bringing the first unlimited online backup service to the Mac, Mozy has been embraced by more than just early adopters and techies. Mac users from different geographies and age groups are gathering more and more irreplaceable digital content they can’t risk losing, and they’re backing that data up with Mozy. In fact, we currently back up over 15 petabytes of data.

Our engineers were so excited about the new operating system that they had Mozy ready to support Snow Leopard before it was officially released. With Snow Leopard, Mozy can run faster and use less memory, meaning a quicker and more enjoyable backup experience for our users.

Here is a chart to show Snow Leopard’s adoption among our Mozy for Mac users. Enjoy!