Mozy

According to recent research, we Brits received £2.4bn worth of unwanted presents over the Christmas break.  That’s a lot of novelty socks, cheap perfume and tat with vague golfing allusions.

For those of you who feigned a smile of gratitude we reward you with two things:

1) The link to the Oxfam shop finder

2) The chance to swap your unwanted gift for a brand new iPad

That’s right, we want to give you the chance to get the gift you really wanted, simply by sending us a picture of the gift you got.  So, before you send your unloved presents to the charity shop, email us a picture to mystory@mozy.com, tweet them to us @mozyuk or post them to our Facebook or Google+ pages.   We’ll send out an iPad to the person we think is most deserving.
Check out our competition page for more info.

If you were one of the lucky ones, on the other hand, who’s already sitting pretty with the tablet of your dreams, we have a gift for you too!

For the whole of January, we’re offering 20.12% off of our annual and biennial subscriptions to MozyHome – giving you access to all of your backed-up files from your tablet.

So, no more memory sticks, cables or emailing yourself documents so you can see them on your tablet, just access them straight through the Mozy app.

Simply enter the promocode Mozy2012 at the checkout to get your 20.12% discount.

Happy New Year everyone!

One of the great things about having a camera on your phone is that it’s always with you so, even though you couldn’t know in advance that your mate was going to fall flat on his face in the mud, you’ll still be able to make sure that the rest of the world can share in his humiliation through the awesome power of Facebook.

But, for the really important occasions, most of us still like to take a conventional camera.  Weddings, christenings and barmizvahs demand a better quality of picture that you can generally get with six-times optical zoom on a clam phone.

So, we end up with two tiers of photos: everyday photos on your phone and special photos on your camera.  Which is all well and good until you want to share your pictures.  When trying to show off your boyfriend to colleagues in the bar after work, that picture of him in the mourning suit at your sister’s wedding is on your laptop at home and you have to choose between a snap of his Dot Cotton impression and that time he managed to balance a pizza box on his face.

And September can be one of the most frustrating months as you realise that all of the holiday pictures you took in Cancun are at home and your only record of summer is the check-in queue photo that you posted to twitter in an attempt to shame the airline into an upgrade.  How are you going to trump Dave-in-Finance’s pictures from Kavos with that?

Enter the Mozy App for iPhone and Android.  Mozy lets you access all of the data that you backed up on your computer right from your smartphone.  So, once you’ve synced your camera with your laptop, your back up will give you access to all your photos on your phone, regardless of which device you used to take them.

So, should you want to prove that the fish you caught on your trip really was ‘this big’ or the girl you met in Marbs really was ‘this hot’, all you have to do is reach for your phone.  You can even use the app to post the picture to Facebook so the rest of the world can witness your glory.

Of course, if your friends download the Mozy app, it may mean that they have every picture they’ve ever taken of you to hand at all the least opportune moments.  We apologise in advance for any future incidents where anyone reveals that experimental haircut you thought made you look edgy when you were 15.

According to a report in today’s Metro (www.metro.co.uk), Saturday’s fire at the London Park Lane Hilton sent Black Eyed Peas’ Will.i.am into a spin as he hurried to protect his laptop, which contained the latest edits of the band’s new album.

It’s moments like these that make us realise just how valuable the information on our computers really is.

Now, you may not have the only version of the next multi-platinum-selling album saved to your hard drive, but each of us has our own precious stuff there that we’d hate to lose.  That’s why having a backup copy of the files you treasure is so important.

Mozy customer Beth Lutz knows just what it’s like to lose everything in a fire.  You can hear her story, and how Mozy helped, in this video:

Nearly two thirds of Brits planned to make a New Year’s resolution this week, according to research from insurance comparison service Go Compare, with weight loss topping the list.
After the excesses of the Christmas holidays, it’s no wonder that people are in the mood to shed a few pounds. However, most of us know that, in spite of our best intentions, our resolve will simply dissolve before we have the chance to see our goals through. 54% of people answering the survey admitted they would probably have broken their pledge by the end of January. And many of us us have probably given up already.

So, why not make a resolution that requires just one action today but will continue to bring you benefits throughout the whole year (and many years to come)?

Getting organised and protecting your digital life is a great resolution and couldn’t be easier. Signing up with an online backup provider like Mozy only takes a few minutes, you simply create an account and choose which types of files and folders you want protected. From there on in, every important document you create, digital photo you take or music track you download will be protected in the event that your computer is lost, damaged or stolen.

Plus you can do the whole thing sat on your sofa whilst you watch the telly. Which is more than can be said for taking up jogging. You may have to put down your chocolate bar whilst you type in a user name – but that only requires restraint for moment or two and even I can manage that.

Some moments in life are truly unmissable. A child’s first steps, a 21st birthday or the time you met Brad Pitt are just the sort of things that you want to capture on film and treasure forever.

But if those pictures exist only on your camera, they’re just one hard-drive crash away from being wiped indefinitely. That’s why backing them up is so important.

Mozy recently ran its Unmissable Moments competition, judged by TV star and celebrity mum Denise Van Outen, to find the baby photo that mums would miss most if anything happened to it.

Denise selected a photograph entered by Lisa King as the winner. It captures a very special moment between her and her daughter Tiana, after Tiana underwent her third life-saving heart operation.

Denise, proud mum to baby Betsy, said: “This is such a touching moment between mother and daughter, it brought a tear to my eye. Tiana is a very brave little girl. After three heart operations she has proved to be a little fighter. This is a memorable picture to be treasured forever. I wish her a happy and healthy future.”

The winner, Lisa King said: “I was so excited to be told that my photo had been chosen by Denise Van Outen in the Mozy unmissable moments competition. My photo shows Tiana in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit when she was nine months old in Great Ormond Street Hospital after surviving her third operation. It is one of our most precious photos ever. I am pleased to say Tiana has recovered well since but will require more surgery in the future. Thank you so much Denise for picking our photo and for the kind words.”

The public voted this photo and five others as finalists, with the competition receiving over 30,000 votes in total.

The five other finalists in the competition were: Lisa Dempster, Kylie Martin, Nicola Reynolds, Loraine Bown, and Sarah Casey.

This image is one of 300 pictures that were recovered from a memory card found in a camera that was pulled from a sewer in Brecon, Mid Wales. The photos came to light when sewer workers discovered that the camera was the cause of a blockage in the drains of the Welsh town.

This is just one example of memories that are flushed away every day. Memories that it’s impossible to capture again. The girls in this picture look like they’re heading out to graduation ball or school prom. Perhaps it’s an 18th birthday? Either way, there’s no way to go back in time and capture those moments again.

And it’s not just your camera that can go missing. Accidentally flushing your camera down the toilet could lose you 300 pictures, but losing your laptop, or it simply crashing, could rob you of your entire photo collection. That’s why backing up your pictures is so important. Services such as Mozy can automate the whole process for you helping to make sure, if anything happens to your hardware, you’ve got a copy backed up online.

If you recognise anyone in our photo here, get in touch with the local authorities as they’re keen to reunite the girls with their pictures. Or, if you find a camera yourself, why not post an imageto IFoundYourCamera.Net and perhaps you can help someone else recapture a memory.

If, on the other hand, you think that relying on strangers to post your pictures back to you is too risky a tactic to protect your own memories, there’s always Mozy

What do you have as your screensaver? Chances are, it’s a picture of you family. Most of us like the reminder as we flick from our email to a spreadsheet that we’re at work for a reason – to support our loved ones and pay for the good times that we can spend with them.

And those good times are reflected in the pictures. Holidays, first steps and birthdays are likely to feature heavily. But what if you lost the picture of that unmissable moment in time that you can never go back and capture again? If your only copy is on your computer, a bump to your hard drive or a spilt cup of coffee could wipe it out forever. And that’s where online backup comes in. Simple, automatic and secure protection of those memories forever.

To celebrate the UK’s unmissable moments, Mozy has teamed up with celebrity Mum, Denise Van Outen to find the best example of a picture that a parent couldn’t bear to be parted from.

To enter, just upload your photo of an unmissable moment with your child here and you could win a photography prize package worth £800, including a personalised HP laptop, digital photo frame, digital camera and an annual MozyHome online backup subscription to help keep those precious photos safe. All five remaining finalists will win a £140 runner-up prize which includes a digital photo frame and an annual MozyHome subscription.

The competition is open until the 5th of November and you can find all of the rules here.

Denise understands the issues only too well as a flood in her own home destroyed all her family snaps. So, as she records Betsy’s unmissable moments, she’s making sure that everything is backed up with Mozy. You can read all about Denise’s involvement with the contest in an exclusive interview in the Sunday Mirror.

Good luck with the competition – we look forward to seeing your entries!

Not so long ago, every school child in the country could expect a September trip to the stationers to stock up on coloured pencils, ink cartridges and bizarre geometry sets that did something complicated an mathematical.

However, kids today scoff (in a derisory rather than tuck-shop fashion) at these antiquated tools of the past, with 78 per cent of teachers demanding homework is done on a computer.

As a result, in a survey of 500 teachers, Mozy found that the three things that teachers thought would be least useful to kids in the next five years were:

• Access to a public library
• A fountain pen
• Times tables

For the school kids of the techno generation, the future involves a different type of back-to-school shopping, with teachers saying that, in the next five years, the top three tools that kids will need are:

• Internet access
• Software to protect their work – such as antivirus and online backup
• A dictionary

Other tools like calculators, encyclopaedias and protractors are also to be consigned to the rubbish bin with less than a fifth of teachers rating any of these as essential tools for homework in the coming years.

The best thing about this is that backup is free – or it is with Mozy if you click here. Which leaves us with just one problem: how do you carve your name on your ruler without a compass?

In a world where free online backup means that anyone can protect their work and access it from anywhere, you’d think that the days of kids using excuses like ‘the dog ate my homework’ would be a thing of the past.  Yet, new research from Mozy showed that 60 per cent of pupils still try to blame the family pooch for not being able to hand in their work.

Even so, 72 per cent of teachers said that pupils were getting more creative with their excuses and coming up with increasingly extravagant reasons for not finishing their assignments.
We asked 1,000 kids what excuses they’d invented and here is a list of some of the more bizarre…

• My dog had a pee on it
• My mum sheared it
• It accidentally got put on the bonfire
• My horse ate it
• My niece was sick on it
• I couldn’t hear you when you set it
• The dog spilt cake on it
• I sprayed it with deodorant and the chemicals shrivelled the paper
• I dropped it in the bath
• I put it in the fridge so that I would remember it when I got the milk out for my cereal in the morning… but I had toast instead
• My chinchilla weed on it
• I accidentally did a poo on it
• I was by the window when I was doing it and it blew away when I went to get a glass of squash
• A snail ate it
• I was walking through the park when a bee stung me so I ran to save myself and dropped my homework
• I dropped it in a river and it was carried away by the current
• My goldfish ate it
• I was on holiday in Martorg on Mars when the assignment was set
• My house caught fire
• My cat ate it – and then threw up on my spare copy
• I left it on the kitchen worktop and it must have stuck to a ready meal before it went into the microwave because the next time I saw it, it was burned to my placemat
• My grandma took it on holiday
• The letters on my keyboard got stuck so all it says is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
• My cat broke my keyboard
• My silly brother drew on it
• I couldn’t get home to do my homework last night as there are really bad road works at the moment
• My sister was sick on it
• A pigeon pooed on it
• It was stolen
• I died
• My family was really hungry and we ate it
• A lion took it
• Someone mugged me and took it
• It was confiscated by airport security

Back in the real world, the research uncovered that half of all the kids polled had genuinely lost their homework due to a technical error on their computer.  So, to keep homework loss purely fictional, Mozy offers everyone 2GB of free back up – that’s enough to back up about 80,000 two-page Word documents.  Just click here to get Mozy.



Mozy is bringing its successful Mozy Affiliate Programme to Europe in a move that will allow web publishers to generate revenues from the Mozy family of online backup solutions.

Anyone who owns a website can take advantage of the affiliate scheme by registering here.  Once registered, Mozy will provide banners, text and links that affiliates can use on their websites and in blogs, newsletters and social media sites to point people to the Mozy website.

In return, affiliates can expect a healthy payment from Mozy for every customer that signs up as a result of their link for up to 100 days after they click – even if they only take a free subscription.

Affiliates can promote any of the Mozy online data backup solutions:

• MozyHome Free
• MozyHome Unlimited
• MozyPro

and will be rewarded more for referrals signing up to annual or biennial contracts.

Mozy pays affiliate commission on a monthly basis by cheque or direct deposit, ensuring that affiliate partners are rewarded quickly for their referrals.

The Times said “[no]one has impressed me quite as much as Mozy.”  Why not get paid to give it away?

To register in the Mozy Affiliate Programme, click here.