In response to several questions regarding Mozy’s compatibility with Snow Leopard, we’re happy to announce that our QA team has approved Mozy for Apple’s latest and greatest software. In fact, we’ve made Snow Leopard the preferred Mozy operating system for Mac.

Our reasons for doing so are twofold:

1. Running the latest Mozy client on Snow Leopard provides gains in the client’s stability and speed.
2. The sooner we get the majority of our Mac users on Snow Leopard, the sooner our engineers can take advantage of Snow Leopard’s 64-bit architecture. What does this mean for you? An even faster, more stable, and more feature-rich Mac Mozy client.

We’ll keep you updated as more releases and updates become available. In the meantime, be safe!

For the past few months, we’ve been giving away free MozyHome accounts on Twitter via a simple contest – we call it Mozy Free Account Friday.

It’s been pretty popular (after all, it’s hard to beat free), so we’ve decided to expand the contest to Facebook. After all, Facebook users need love (and backup) too!

So starting tomorrow, we’ll be giving away a FREE 1-year MozyHome subscription ($54.45 value!) to a randomly chosen entrant each Friday. Sounds great, right? Well it is! So here’s how it will work – in order to be considered you must:

1. Be a fan of Mozy at the time of the giveaway.
2. At some point between 12:00 AM MST and 11:59 PM MST Friday, you must post the following message (or words to this effect):
   

   I just entered Mozy Free Account Friday to win a free year of unlimited online backup! You can win too! Just become a fan of Mozy, post this message in your status, and let Mozy know you’re entered on their fan page! (for more info, check out http://bit.ly/dM9qs)

3. I’ll have a status message posted at 12:00 AM MST Friday on the Mozy fan page. Simply comment on that status to let me know you’re entered!

You can enter the Facebook and Twitter contests once per week. We’ll announce the winner the following Monday. Good luck, and be safe!

UPDATE: In order to verify your compliance with all the requirements should you win, I’ll be briefly friending you. Just so you know.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 NASA mission that put Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the moon. This incredible accomplishment was captured in a black and white video of the two astronauts taking “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” What better way to celebrate the 40th anniversary than by watching the original footage? Only one problem – NASA couldn’t find the tapes.

It turns out that NASA had unintentionally recorded over the original footage of the famous space walk. According to The Associated Press, a digital film restoration company has been hired to restore the video, but it is an expensive and time-consuming process:

“The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a monthslong project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done… The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon. In the 1970s and ’80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.”

We sympathize with NASA and hope they can recover the information. All over the world, however, people are now compiling an increasing amount of digital information. Their data represents family videos and photos, music collections, and financial information. We don’t want anyone – from families all the way up to NASA – to lose vital information.

One way Mozy helps you to preserve your information is that it provides you with the ability to roll back to previous versions of a file. That way, when a file is accidentally deleted or modified, you can roll back to a previous, pristine version.

So congrats, NASA, on an amazing achievement. We look forward to seeing the remastered footage!

On Wednesday, June 3rd at approximately 3pm I was standing on the highest point in North America—the summit of Mt. McKinley in Alaska. It was one of the most challenging and yet most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. As COO of Mozy, I was supported off the mountain by family, friends, and co-workers to whom I am immensely grateful. I was supported on the mountain by lead guide John Race and his two assistants . They helped keep me alive and healthy for the ascent, the summit, and the descent. I carried Mozy and Decho banners with me, along with one for my plane crash survivor sister-in-law and much better blogger, Stephanie Nielson . As I reflect on the experience, there are two things I want to share with the world and customers of Mozy and Decho in particular:

1. The importance of focus
2. Execution, execution, execution

One of the reasons I loved my Denali adventure was because it forced me to focus. Breathe, step carefully, watch the rope, wiggle my fingers and toes to keep them warm, breathe some more, step up again carefully, and so on. I wanted to stay alive and get to the summit. There were few other things to worry about that didn’t lie directly in the path of my ultimate objective. I love that kind of focus.

Even with all the focus in the world, if you can’t execute you’ll be stuck at base camp, or in Talkeetna, or worse…on your couch. Putting all the pieces together and “making it happen” in pursuit of the goal you’re focused on requires a lot of skill and even more dogged determination.

I am happy to work somewhere that has a sharp focus and the discipline to execute accordingly. We already make the world’s best online backup software, and that is just the beginning. Join me in the figurative “clouds” of the adventure that is Decho. We’re on our way to the summit!

-Vance Checketts, Mozy COO

Hey moms,

From your first family photo as a mother to last year’s tax return, your computers are full of irreplaceable photos, videos, and documents. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything you do and manage your own backup system. Mozy wants to let you know that we have your backup.

During the month of June, you will be able to choose a free T-shirt or onesie for signing up for an unlimited MozyHome account. If Mozy is already automatically backing up your files, you can still get a shirt or onesie by posting a message about Mozy to your blog.

For more details, go to mozy.com/moms.

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

• Added support for EFS encrypted files – The client now supports backing up only the portions of the files that have changed for EFS encrypted files, rather than the entire file.
• Improved the speed of launching configuration – When you launch the configuration utility, it now displays much faster than before.
• Added welcome tab in the client configuration – The client configuration window now has a Welcome tab that displays information about how Mozy works, how to select files for backup, and how to perform a restore.
• Added tooltips to the tabs in client configuration – Added pop-up text that displays when a mouse is hovered over a tab (tooltips) in the client Configuration window. The tooltips explain the tasks that can be completed on each tab of the Configuration window.
• Enhanced locked file support – The client now uses Windows Volume Shadow Services (VSS) for all files to prevent locking. This allows files to be used by other applications while they are being backed up.
• Improved the password change flow – Now when you change your password on the Mozy Web site, you are automatically asked to enter your new password when a backup occurs or when you launch the Configuration window.
• Other compatibility 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 !

Howard Moore from La Canada, California, received a frightening wake-up call one day, that convinced him of the need to find a better backup solution for his data.

Just days before Christmas, Howard and his family were victims of a house burglary.

Before signing up for Mozy, Howard would back up to external hard drives every night. He would alternate between the two drives, and take one off-site with him to his work office. However, since Howard has started working more from home, his second hard drive is no longer located off-site.

As a result, when the burglars came into Howard’s home, both of his hard drives were sitting next to his desktop. But, for whatever reason, Howard’s home office located in the back of the house, was not broken into. Maybe the burglars were too distracted by the Christmas gifts and his wife’s jewelery to even go into the office, but for whatever the reason, Howard is grateful.

"If the burglars had come into the back room, I would have lost everything," Howard said. "I had both external backup drives sitting right next to my PC! The home burglary convinced me of the need for off-site storage. I checked many other services for several weeks and Mozy was by far the best for me. It is designed for my needs."

Howard has been using Mozy ever since the burglary, and could not be happier with the service.

"I have only had to restore a few files since becoming a Mozy user, but I have tried multiple methods, and all of them could not have been any easier," Howard said. "What I like most about Mozy is that it’s always there, discretely doing its job."

As mentioned in our previous blog post, we’ve had a big announcement to make, and, well, the time has come! Earlier this year, we reached 1 million Mozy customers! To celebrate this significant milestone, we decided to find our millionth customer and give them a warm Mozy "thank you."

Our search took us out to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where we met up with our very own spokesperson iJustine to surprise Nathan Kletzing, our millionth customer, with a massive Mozy prize! Here’s her video of the event-

So congrats to Nathan and his wife. Enjoy a million seconds of peace together, as you take an all-expenses-paid 7-day cruise to Mexico on us , comfortable in the knowledge that while you’re away, all your data is backed up with Mozy!

P.S. Be sure to check out our previous blog post for winners of the Guess The Prize contest!

We passed a major milestone earlier this year, and now one lucky customer will be receiving a massive Mozy prize to celebrate!

What is the prize, you ask? Well, that’s the catch. We’re not going to announce it right now. Instead, we’ll be publishing a series of clues on this blog and on our Twitter feed over the next couple of days that point towards what the massive prize is. The first three people to correctly guess what the massive prize is will receive an iPod Touch courtesy of Mozy! Just email your guesses to nate@mozy.com . Good luck, Sherlock!

Clues:

• First Clue – Julee Cruise is the artist.
• +39° 36′ 13.00", -78° 44′ 34.00" – Mexico , Alleghany County, Maryland.
• http://www.lore-and-saga.co.uk/html/dice.html – Mia is also obscurely known as Mexican .
  
• 37.629731,-77.515989 – Henrico County, Virginia, site of the 7 Days Battles in the US Civil War
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Jo1gH89VM – Trailer from the film "American Graffiti ," where teens spend a night cruising .
  
• E115 – The atomic number for ununpentium , the radioactive element that makes time travel possible in the TV show Seven Days .
• Classic Midway Driver – Cruisin ‘ USA
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/6166367.stm – the ship being rescued was the Mexico .
• http://is.gd/sqrU – URL had two "sevens" in it – http://www.nypost.com/seven /seven .htm
• http://is.gd/srHx – Clip from the movie "Rejs," translated into English as "The Cruise ."
• http://is.gd/ss6S – The photo on the album cover is of the famous Black Panther Salute from the 1968 Mexico City Olympics
• http://is.gd/ssjp – Photographer references a seven days break
• John Houseman – A good friend of Orson Welles, one of his (uncredited) roles was in the film "Seven Days in May ".
• 75992729321
• 38.226600, -112.299072 – Cruise missile caught in flight on Google Maps.
• kwanzaa – a seven-day long celebration.

Winners: We only had one winner who got all required elements of the guess correct -Eric Nagel. Congrats! If you didn’t win, stay tuned because there will absolutely be more contests in the near future!

Since we last had a blog here at Mozy, quite a bit has changed. We’ve been acquired by EMC, released several new products, and we’ve learned a lot. As a reflection of what we’ve learned, we’re relaunching our blog with a renewed emphasis on you, our customer. We hope to be able to provide you with tips, inside looks at Mozy products, articles from members of the Mozy team, and status updates on the Mozy service. We’ll be posting regularly, so check back often for new info or subscribe to our RSS feed! In the meantime…

Be safe,

Nate and the rest of the Mozy crew