The Mozy Blog » Mozy

What Is Your Data Worth To You?

nate — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:38:54 +0000

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.

The Rise of China’s Internet

nate — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:58:42 +0000

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.

Client Release: Mac 1.5.1 and Windows 1.16.1

nate — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:17:32 +0000

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.

Get Your Scary Face On!

nate — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:59:26 +0000

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.

…

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:

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.
Send your submission to stories@mozy.com by October 25, 2009. Please include your name, age (we won’t post it), and city/state.
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!

Mozy and Vodafone

nate — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:01:42 +0000

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.

Snow Leopard Adoption on Mozy

devin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:25:48 +0000

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!

Life In The Cloud

nate — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:28:35 +0000

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.

Mozy, McAfee

devin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:45:09 +0000

McAfee has made a name for itself combating the biggest security threats on the Internet. Millions of McAfee customers around the globe have come to rely on McAfee to protect themselves against identity theft, phishing scams, spyware and malicious web sites. It isn’t a big leap to protecting customers from hard disk crashes, theft and accidental deletion.

McAfee is introducing a new online backup service, and guess what, McAfee Online Backup is powered by Mozy. The new service is available to customers in the US today, with availability in other countries later this year.

We’re delighted to be working with McAfee to bring online backup to their millions of customers. Protecting over 15 petabytes of customer information for more than a million customers, Mozy is the world’s most trusted online backup service.

Client Release: Mac 1.5

nate — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:05:38 +0000

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

Improved memory usage – The client will run much faster and use fewer resources, especially during backups and restores.
Better client transparency during configuration – 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.
Simpler options – The list of options in the menu bar has been reduced and simplified.
Other compatibility, stability and performance improvements.

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

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!

Mozy, China Telecom, and eYun

nate — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:53:01 +0000

In the past several years, Internet usage in China has absolutely exploded, and now there are more than 330 million Chinese Internet users who, like everyone else, have data that needs to be protected and secured.

That’s why we here at Decho/Mozy are excited to announce our partnership with China Telecom, the largest telecommunications and broadband provider in China! With China Telecom’s 214 million fixed lines, 47 million broadband subscribers, and 35 million mobile users, we’ll be able to help millions of Chinese Internet users protect and manage their data in the cloud!

We’re calling the new service eYun (which is Chinese for eCloud). It’s powered by Mozy and already has 15,000 pilot users,. We’ll initially be providing safe, secure online backup services, but in the future, eYun will let users do even more with their data with additional cloud services.

You can find out more about the Mozy/China Telecom partnership in our press release.