Mozy

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.

September is the sixth annual National Preparedness Month. NPM 2009 is focusing on changing perceptions around emergency preparedness. FEMA, Citizen Corps, and the Ad Council want to spread the word that preparedness “goes beyond fire alarms, smoke detectors, dead-bolt locks, and extra food in the pantry.” Likewise, disaster preparedness goes beyond seasons – it’s a year-round necessity. For those of us who keep our lives on our computers, a disaster could also include a hardware failure, stolen computer, etc. Mozy and online backup act as a safety deposit box for your digital files so no matter what happens to your computer or the home or office where it resides, your files will always be safe.

We’d like to remind you of the importance of making sure your vital information is protected as well. In an era when our family photos, music collections, vital documents, and much more are stored on computer hard drives that can be destroyed in minutes during a natural disaster, the smart thing to do is to back up your data remotely. Mozy urges you to make sure you’re prepared in the event of disaster, so you can protect your family, your belongings, and your memories.

Here’s our starter list of disaster preparedness tips. Please leave your suggested additions in the comments below.

• Keep a battery-powered radio on hand
• Have a flashlight with spare batteries
• Keep a 72 hour kit containing food and water
• Have an extra change of clothing and toiletries
• Back up your computers with Mozy online backup

We also suggest that you download Are You Ready? An In-depth Guide to Citizen Preparedness and ready your household against everything from tornados to tsunamis.

The New York Times warned small business owners to think about a disaster recovery plan last week. Jennifer Walzer, the author, has experience working in small businesses and understands a complete plan isn’t always possible. However, she does write that some elements of a disaster recovery plan are better than none.

According to the article, data loss is the most common business disaster. Here is the second of six steps Walzer suggests to make sure you get the right solution for your business’s needs:

“Consider backup options. Your backup must be offsite, secure and available for recovery 24/7. One popular option that meets the above criteria, with the added benefit of ease of use and automation, is online backup.” (A Small-Business Guide to Disaster Recovery)

The Baltimore-based law firm Goodell, DeVries, Leech & Dan learned that data loss can happen to anyone anytime. A senior partner was preparing for a trial in Arkansas when his computer crashed two days before the hearing. The firm had yet to implement a backup solution, so the Director of Technology, David Roden, found himself on the next flight into Arkansas.

After this, Roden began looking for a reliable solution that wouldn’t hog their network resources. Shortly after that, the firm decided on MozyPro. If a computer ever fails again, anywhere in the world, Roden will be able to manage the recovery right from his office.

MozyPro provides simple, secure, and automatic backup that can literally save your business in the event of a disaster without the large investment in time and money of other backup solutions.

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!

At the sunny Ritz Carlton Resort in Orlando, Walter Petruska of the University of San Francisco stood at the EduComm conference and presented on how the university implemented new technology to cut costs and improve protection of the university’s intellectual assets. Petruska specifically addressed how online backup has helped the university protect information on faculty and staff laptops and desktops.

Earlier in the day during the general luncheon, The New York Times Columnist David Pogue gave the keynote. He, too, discussed how new technologies are changing the college campus. He called out Twitter and other social media tools that engage students for better or worse.

EduComm 2009 brought together those in education who have a vision of tomorrow’s campus and how new technologies are shaping the future of higher education. At Mozy, we too are committed to helping those in higher education to protect their information through a simple, secure and affordable backup service. In fact, we announced this week that we have more than 700 educational institutions using Mozy. More information can be found at www.mozy.com/education.

This week MSNBC posted an interesting article by Mark A.R. Mitchell about preparing a business for natural disaster. He mentions how he grew up in Tornado country and was left for three days without power. The experience has reminded him the importance of preparing a business for disasters, and the first tip he provides is to back up.

“You need to back up your systems, and it’s not hard to do. Virtual offsite backups give you more disaster protection than onsite backups to an external hard drive, and the further offsite those backups are the less likely the tornado coming through your town will hit the site where your backups are stored.”

His comment reminds me of a MozyPro customer, Joseph W. Booth, who is a long-time member and contributor to the American Bar Association. Booth started using MozyPro after he launched his own law firm earlier this year and ended up savings 92 percent in backup costs. He says he works in “Tornado alley “ and trusts MozyPro to back up and protect his important law firm files from the threat of a disaster.

Whether it’s protecting against a tornado as MSNBC’s Mitchell discussed in his article or protecting against other types of disasters or thefts, a good backup strategy includes keeping an off-site copy of critical business information.

USA Today Personal Technology Columnist Ed Baig published a story of two passengers on US Airways flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River earlier this year. While one passenger was using Mozy online backup and able to recover his data, another wished he was using Mozy:

"Few people suffer data loss in quite as harrowing a fashion as Bill Wiley. He was a second row passenger on the plane that was famously forced to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River. The passengers all survived the crash, of course. But Wiley still hasn’t recovered the two computers he had on board, containing about 250 gigabytes of data from his employer Computer Associates.

Wiley had been good about backing up files on the two computers by sharing the contents of one hard drive with the other. He also kept data on thumb drives. And he rarely traveled with both machines, but had to in this case because of an assignment. "I had no idea how screwed I was about to be," he recalls.

Fellow passenger Paul Jorgensen was more fortunate, at least when it came to his computer. The night before the flight, Jorgensen backed up "a ton of data" on his IBM ThinkPad via a business account his employer had with the Mozy online backup service. Jorgensen works for Epocrates, a producer of medical software.

"Pretty quickly after I realized I was 100% safe [on the ferry] I realized I was going to be in pretty deep trouble without that laptop," says Jorgensen, who had been seated in the first row of the plane. "My life is in that laptop."

Within a day, Mozy sent him 6 DVDs with recovered data. "The accident was on a Thursday. By Monday I was completely back up and running."

Fortunately, most people won’t ever have the experience of losing a laptop as a result of a crash landing into the Hudson River, however, catastrophic computer failure does occur on a daily basis as a result of hard drive crash, leaving a laptop in the taxi, or something as benign as a spilled cup of coffee. By contrast, Mr. Wiley is out thousands of dollars and countless time, while Mr. Jorgensen (who has been using Mozy) was back up and running within a few days.

We’re grateful that all passengers on Flight 1549 were in the hands of such an experienced and skillful crew and were all and able to return to their loved ones without any loss of life or significant injury.

Update: ComputerWorld Columnist Lucas Mearian also published a story about Mozy customer Paul Jorgensen:

"The only thing else not lost forever was the data stored on the laptop, copies of which were kept on the servers of an online backup company. Epocrates uses Mozy to back up data and, uncharacteristically, Jorgensen had backed up his files the night before the flight. Six DVDs holding the data were sent to Jorgensen on Jan. 19, just four days after the crash. "I was left without an excuse to not work. It was almost too quick," he joked. . . .

Without the backup, he would have not only lost all of his business data, but a lot of personal data and photos that he kept on the lost laptop. It was one less thing to worry about, he noted."

Data loss is inevitable. Whether as the result of hard drive crash, theft, accidental deletion, virus, or natural disaster, it happens to the best of us. According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. Ouch! The good news is that data loss doesn’t need to be catastrophic as long as the business has a solid backup plan in place such as MozyPro . We hear from countless happy MozyPro customers on an regular basis who- after experiencing the near tragedy of hard drive crash, lost laptop in the taxi, flooded basement, etc. – are thrilled when MozyPro is able to “save their bacon."

We were pleased to learn yesterday that MozyPro had been awarded the Excellence in Technology Award in the “Backup and Recovery” category from the readers of Small Business Computing. The article states, “this year marks the first time an online backup and recovery service has won the top spot, and honors go to MozyPro.” This award further reinforces Mozy’s position as the most trusted online backup service for consumers and businesses alike. After a humble launch in December 2006, MozyPro has since grown to more than 30,000 business customers ranging from then smallest home office users to large corporations like General Electric.

Since the launch of MozyPro , a tremendous amount of time and effort has gone into continually improving the service with enhancements like an improved Windows Server client, the availability of an AES private encryption key, and the recent release of a Mac version of MozyPro. We still have a lot of work to do, so expect more exciting enhancements and improvements to MozyPro over the coming months and years. We wouldn’t have won the Excellence in Technology Award without the outstanding feedback we receive from you, our customers. Whether positive or negative, we appreciate the honest feedback, so keep it coming!