Mozy

We are once again proud to announce another Mozy for Mac release. Here are a few highlights from this latest release:

• Memory and performance improvements – Making choices about which files to back up should be very fast. Backups start more quickly and use a limited amount of memory.
• No longer depends on Spotlight – We now search for files using our own technology in order to avoid some inconsistencies in Apple’s.
• Better support for Snow Leopard – We’ve added a file scanning progress indicator, and warnings when a backup is started before the client is fully configured and when changes might be lost when the configuration is closed without saving.
• Translated into 9 non-English languages – German, Greek, British English, Castillian Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Slovenian. If you have chosen one of those languages in System Preferences, Mozy will use it automatically.
• Other compatibility, stability and performance improvements.

To see the full release notes and download the new client version, check out our update sections for MozyHome and MozyPro. Please note that you don’t have to download and install the new client manually, as your old client will auto-update.

Finally, we are constantly looking for ways to improve Mozy, so if you have any comments or suggestions, please email us at support@mozy.com!

Q. So what do you get when you cross Cox Business’ awesome high-speed business class Internet products with Mozy Online Backup?

A. Cox Business Online Backup, of course!

So here’s the skinny – Cox will be offering complimentary online backup service to Cox Business Internet subscribers. Businesses will receive between 2 GB and 10 GB of online backup storage space, based on their speed of Internet service and can purchase additional capacity if needed (and if you don’t currently subscribe to Cox Business Internet, don’t worry! You can still get Cox Business Online Backup, it’s just a la carte.)

“Cox Business Online Backup powered by Mozy provides the security and flexibility indicative of a business solution and is a compelling alternative to external hard drives and stacks of CDs cluttering the desktop,” said Kristine Faulkner, vice president, product development and management, Cox Business. “Cox Business is taking another important step in combining business-class broadband speed and applications.” To that, we say huzzah!

Cox has already made Cox Business Backup available in their Southern VA markets (including Roanoke and Hampton Roads) with plans to release it in their other markets next year. We here at Mozy are thrilled to be able to work with Cox to provide safe, secure, easy to use online backup to their nearly 250,000 small business subscribers!

To learn more about our partnership with Cox Business, check out our press release, or listen to the Cox Business Report Podcast’s interview with iJustine!

Your holiday gift-giving list can add up quickly, so keep it simple this year: Help others protect their holiday photos, videos, and new computers with MozyHome Unlimited and we’ll throw in a gift just for you.

Now through January 10, 2010, receive a $25 online gift card for yourself when 2 of your friends or family purchase a MozyHome Unlimited account.

You can use email, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more to spread the word about Mozy. Just go to http://mozy.com/holiday to get started.

Best of all — you can use your online gift card however you’d like: get yourself a gift your friends and family didn’t get you or get a gift for a friend — it’s up to you.

Additionally, if you are a MozyHome Free user, you can earn an extra 512 MB of backup space for you AND your friend when they start backing up. That’s enough space to back up 250,000 text email messages, 300 photos or 100 MP3 files! Log into your account at https://mozy.com/login and click the Referrals link on the left for more information.

The holidays are upon us, and many people will be looking for a way to make extra money. Well, we here at Mozy are excited to offer a new way for you to make some cash! All you have to do is send us all your old family photos and home videos, and we’ll pay you $100 cash! I mean, those pictures and videos are OLD, right? Right? OK, so we’re not actually going to do this program, and let’s be honest, the thought of selling your family memories is somewhat preposterous (at least we think so).

We recently ran some surveys in New York City and San Francisco, where we asked people if they would be willing to sell their laptops to us, on the spot. Nearly 98% of the people we surveyed said they would be willing to sell their laptop for an average price of about a thousand dollars, or roughly the cost of the hardware. On the surface, this makes sense. After all, for a thousand dollars, you can buy yourself a brand new laptop. But then you start to think about all the stuff you carry on your laptop. If you’re like most of us, you’ll have pictures, music, videos, and work files on your laptop, and many of those are irreplaceable. All of a sudden, your laptop starts to look a lot more valuable.

We ran another set of surveys in Los Angeles where iJustine asked people if she could buy their laptop – data and all – on the spot. Just check out their responses.

Fairly telling, we think. And it just so happens that when we reminded the people we surveyed in San Francisco and New York that they would lose all of their files with the laptop, a solid 23% of them changed their minds, saying that their laptops were absolutely priceless. The fact that people changed their minds after thinking about the information contained on the laptop points out what Mozy users already know – that you can’t put a price on irreplaceable memories and information. Once digital information is gone – whether you’ve lost it to theft, disaster, or sold to a stranger on the street – you can’t get it back. Back it up.

When we posted about our new partnership with China Telecom, we didn’t do a great job explaining how HUGE the Internet is in China, so we threw this graphic together to demonstrate:

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.

In the spirit of everyone releasing new stuff (see previous post), we’re proud to announce the latest releases of our Mac and Windows Mozy clients!

Mac 1.5.1

Here are some of the highlights from the Mac 1.5.1 release:

• Improved external drive backup.
• Better connection reliability.
• Fixed an issue which accidentally deleted the /tmp symlink causing issues with some third party applications.

Windows 1.16.1

Here are some of the highlights from the Windows 1.16.1 release:

• Faster performance and responsiveness of Save/Close/Cancel in Configuration for users with many files selected for backup.
• Improved the timeout retry logic when there is a network error during a restore.
• Fixed an issue where a backup would stall indefinitely in some rare instances.

You can download the links to the full release notes and new client downloads for MozyHome for both Windows and Mac here.

UPDATE: Due to some circumstances beyond our control, we’ve had to discontinue the contest, but look for it to make a reappearance at a future time.

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Yeah, that’s a scary face. And just like the picture above, data loss is scary too! Just how scary? You show us!

Turns out we’re giving three $50 cash prizes to the owners of the scariest data loss faces. And if you’d rather spin us a nightmarish tale of your own data loss, we’ve got three $50 prizes for that too! Here’s how to enter:

1. Snap a picture of your scariest “I just lost all my data” face (original photos only) and/or write up your non-fiction data loss story in 200 words or less.
2. Send your submission to stories@mozy.com by October 25, 2009. Please include your name, age (we won’t post it), and city/state.
3. Six winners (3 photos, 3 stories) will be announced the week of Halloween and will each receive $50 cash.

You can get more info and check out submissions here!

Good luck, and be safe!

We here at Mozy are excited to announce a new partnership with Vodafone! Vodafone is the world’s largest international mobile telecom company, with mobile networks in over 70 countries (including a 45% stake in US telecom giant Verizon Wireless), more than 300 million customers, and over $60 billion in annual revenues. They will be introducing a range of business and consumer personal cloud services that are built on Decho’s Mozy online backup service. They’ll initially launch with a PC backup and data management service that will allow customers to protect, access, organize, and share their data. This service will be launched across a number of Vodafone’s European markets throughout the rest of the year.

This partnership, along with our partnerships with China Telecom and McAfee, highlight the emergence of “the personal cloud,” a phrase coined by Frank Gillett of Forrester (subscription required) to mean the movement of individuals’ personal data into the cloud, where they’ll be able to monitor, safeguard, and use their data anytime, anywhere. It’s an exciting revolution in the way we interact with our information, and we’re thrilled to be at the forefront.

Just one month after Snow Leopard’s release, we’ve learned that just over 30 percent of our Mac users are running Snow Leopard. This puts our adoption rate right along with the adoption rates reported by The Omni Group (27.5%) and Adium (28.43%). Although these don’t represent the entire Mac community, they do give a general idea of how many people are migrating to Snow Leopard.

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!

Just another quick graphic to show how our digital lives are becoming more and more integrated with the cloud through email, streaming video and music, mobile devices like phones and netbooks, and services like Mozy that help people put their data in the cloud where it can be accessed from virtually anywhere.