Mozy

Forget poring over a love letter this Valentines Day trying to identify the handwriting, says survey findings.  Forget choosing the perfect red rose at the florist.  You can even forget identifying a blind date by the rolled-up newspaper they’re holding under the station clock.

Recent research commissioned by Mozy, the world’s most trusted provider of data protection and availability for consumers and businesses, uncovered a dying trend for romance in the UK as new technology is vanquishing many of our traditional romantic gestures.

Don’t expect to receive a scented handwritten note from a secret admirer this Valentine’s Day, as over a third of Brits no longer hand write letters, with 18 per cent no longer writing love letters at all.

Mozy’s research revealed that 21^st Century lovers are no longer left with much to cling to as physical tokens of affection increasingly give way to cyber versions, which are harder to preserve over time.

Remember those halcyon days, when making a mix tape of moody melodies was the ultimate way to signal your feelings for a sweetheart? Well, 34 per cent of us no longer bother.

What about printing out photos of loved ones to create a photo album of memorable moments? Forget it! 24 per cent of those surveyed by Mozy no longer entertain the idea.

And just how has technology impacted on our present giving over this romantic holiday? 17 per cent of us no longer make the effort to buy flowers from a florist, preferring to rely on the internet instead.

The demise of paper mail has heralded the swan song for this most intimate of Valentine’s Day acts. Love letters truly played their part in the past, existing as the long-treasured link to first love and long distance romances.

Claire Galbois-Alcaix of online backup company Mozy, which carried out the survey of 3,000 consumers across the UK, said: “In the past, Valentine’s mementoes were things like dried roses, scented love letters and photographs of your loved one that could be stored away in tissue paper and shoe boxes to be returned to and looked over with fond memories. Now, with social media, text messages and email, technology has changed the way Brits express themselves, choosing Facebook photo albums over the printed variety, an email over a handwritten love letter, and a playlist over a mix tape.

“If you’re not careful, these mementoes can become transient and lost forever with a phone upgrade, a computer crash or simple theft.  To make sure that your memories are there for years to come, it’s a good idea to ensure everything is securely backed up online, so it can be accessed anywhere, anytime from the cloud and this is something Mozy already help many customers to do.”

Romantic gestures featured repeatedly in Mozy’s TOP 50 THINGS WE NO LONGER DO AS A RESULT OF TECHNOLOGY

1. Ring the cinema to find out times

2. Going into the travel agents to research a holiday

3. Record things using VHS

4. Dial directory enquiries

5. Use public telephones

6. Book tickets for events over the phone

7. Print photos

8. Put a classified ad in the shop window

9. Ring the speaking clock

10. Carry portable CD players

11. Write handwritten letters

12. Buy disposable cameras

13. Take plenty of change for pay phones

14. Make mix tapes

15. Pay bills at the post office

16. Use an address book

17. Check a map before or during car journey

18. Reverse charges in payphones

19. Go into the bank or building society to conduct your business

20. Buy TV listings

21. Own an encyclopaedia

22. Queue to get car tax in Post Office

23. Develop and send off for photographs

24. Read a hard copy of the Yellow Pages

25. Look up something in dictionary

26. Remember phone numbers/ Have a phone book

27. Watch videos

28. Have pen friends

29. Use a telephone directory

30. Use pagers

31. Fax things

32. Buy CD’s/ Have a CD collection

33. Pay by cheque

34. Make photo albums

35. Watch programmes at the time they are shown

36. Dial 1471 when you get home

37. Warm milk or other hot drinks on stove

38. Try on lots of pairs of shoes on high street

39. Hand wash clothes

40. Advertise in trading papers

41.  Send love letters

42. Hand-write essays / school work

43. Buy flowers from a florist

44. Work out how to spell something yourself

45. Keep a personal diary

46. Send post cards

47. Buy newspapers

48. Hang washing out in winter

49. Keep printed bills or bank statements

50. Visit car boot sales

Mozy is proud to announce the winner of our Pathetic Presents competition.  Conor Buckley won with the mismatched present he received from his wife.

“It was funny but a little disappointing to find out that I’d bought my wife a new MacBook for Christmas and only got some novelty boxer shorts in return,” says Conor.  “But winning an iPad in Mozy’s competition really makes up for it!  I think that Mozy’s great and now we’ll be able to use Mozy Stash to synchronise data between my prize and my wife’s Christmas present.  Hopefully, that way, we’ll be more ‘in sync’ with our Christmas presents next year!”

Thanks to everyone who entered the competition.  We had some truly great (awful?) entries – it’s a good job you guys have such a great sense of humour!

We’re sorry that we couldn’t make you all winners but, if you didn’t win the prize, we’d still love to give you a free gift in the form of our MozyHome Free accounts.  Simply visit www.mozy.co.uk/home/free to download a free account.

We’ll be offering other chances to win with Mozy in the future so stay tuned!

Congratulations Conor!

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!

What a year 2011 was!  The News of the World closed, two Royals got married and a dog called Fenton won international fame when he accidentally shepherded a herd of deer into the road.

And things haven’t been standing still at Mozy either.  In 2011, we saw:

-       The launch of the Mozy app for Android and iOS devices allowing access to all your backed-up data wherever you are

-       The launch of the new Mozy restore process making getting your data back easier than ever

-       An improved web access experience

-       The start of the private beta for Mozy Stash in the USA that will allow easy syncronisation of files across multiple devices.

And 2012 is set to offer more of the same with the public beta of Stash on the horizon and new features and functions for both MozyHome and MozyPro so stay tuned to the MozyBlog to be the first with all the news!

In the meantime, we’d like to wish everyone a very happy New Year from all of us at Mozy.

We really enjoyed making our Back Up; Don’t Smash Up video, so it’s great to find out how many people enjoyed watching it too!

Hundreds of thousands of people have watched, shared and ‘liked’ the film in which we asked people on the streets of London if they would be willing to smash their old laptops in exchange for a brand new Mac Book.  That makes us very happy.

We were also really happy to find out that the video was commended in the Best IT Video category at the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards last night.

Thanks to everyone who stopped in the street to take part in the video – especially our the two proud owners of new Macs whose backup was up to date and who were confident nothing would be lost when we took a mallet to their laptops.  And, of course, thanks to everyone who voted for us!

If you still haven’t seen the clip, here it is again.  Keep watching and remember: back up; don’t smash up!

Many of you know that, whilst Mozy is 100 per cent owned by EMC, the Mozy team is also part of the VMware family.  Like all families, we like nothing better than a get together – only in our case, we’re inviting 7,000 people (I don’t fancy doing the washing up after that family meal!).

From the 18^th to the 20^th of October, Mozy will be at VMworld in Copenhagen on stand #63.  And we’ll be showing off exactly what being part of the EMC and VMware family means.  So, drop by if you want to hear about:

• Mozy Data Shuttle – which uses hard drives from EMC sister-company Iomega to turbo initial backups into the Cloud
• Mozy Stash – which uses the technology Mozy developed for VMware’s Project Octopus to share data across multiple devices
• The Mozy Apps – which give you access to your backed-up data from iOS and Android devices

The Mozy Apps are already available in Europe but a visit to the Mozy stand is a great way to get a heads up on Data Shuttle and Stash before they reach European soil.

For more information about Mozy at VMworld, follow @MozyEU or #VMworld on twitter.

The Mozy iOS app now supports data decryption for customers using personal key encryption. Android update due  within weeks.

Since its initial release in March this year, the Mozy app for iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices) has quickly become a favorite feature for Mozy customers. With the app you can access any file you have backed up to Mozy right from your mobile device. Complete with photo previews, document viewing, and the ability to open files in other applications or send them via email, the app makes Mozy more than just a way to protect against data loss. Along with similar access through any browser, the app provides a way to access all your personal and professional files from anywhere.

With version 1.2, now available at no charge from the App Store, we’re able to offer a feature that many (often quite vocal) customers have been awaiting: personal key data decryption.

About Personal Key Data Decryption

To protect customer privacy, Mozy online backup always encrypts the data for each file before sending it to Mozy. About 95% of our customers opt for Mozy’s default encryption. The remaining 5% opt to employ a personal key for encrypting their backups. When you encrypt with a personal key, it ensures that the only person who can readily decrypt your files is you. Of course, this also means that Mozy has no way to decrypt your data if you forget your personal key.

Data Decryption Comes to the iOS App

With this latest release, you can set the personal key used for backup on each of your computers (even if each uses a different key). The mobile app can then download any file, use the key to decrypt its content, and then allow you to use the file as you need. You can view it, email it, or even open it in another app.

Mobile & the Trade-offs of Using a Personal Key

There are certain services that Mozy performs online to support the Mozy app. For example, the file names used by digital cameras make it hard to know what’s in a photo, so the Mozy app displays photo thumbnails.

When you view a folder containing photos, an online service generates a thumbnail for each photo, allowing the app to download a small image instead of whole photos, saving time and bandwidth.

However, if your photos are encrypted with a personal key, then Mozy can only provide a generic thumbnail indicating that Mozy cannot read the photo.

But you can still download the whole photo and–once downloaded and decrypted by the mobile app–you can view it on your device.

Your Turn: Go Rate the Update

We know many Mozy customers have been waiting for this update. If you’re one of them, please rate the Mozy app in the App Store.

A Note to Android Users

We know you want personal key support, too. We’re working on it right now and aim to release the 1.2 update for Android before the end of October.

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.

Mozy has been around for over five years now – but we’ve not stood still.  So, if you signed up to Mozy some time ago, you may not know about all the features and functionality that exist in Mozy today.   Here’s our list of ten things you might not have known you can do with Mozy.

1)      Access your files anywhere

With Mozy’s web access portal, you can log into your Mozy account from any web-connected device and get the files you want, whenever you want them.

2)      Get your files on your phone

With the Mozy app, you can browse and download any of your backed-up files on your iPhone or Android mobile.

3)      Use Mozy to transfer files to your iPad or Android tablet

Don’t worry about whether you created your files on your laptop or desktop, access them all from your iPad or Android tablet using Mozy.

4)      Preview your files before you restore them

Don’t waste time and bandwidth guessing which files you want to download, use Mozy’s thumbnail previews to check them out first.

5)      Back up your NAS

If the primary copy of your data is on your NAS, make sure that’s what you’re backing up with MozyConnect.

6)      Back up to an external hard drive as well as the Cloud

Two backups are better than one!  Use Mozy 2xProtect for fast local backup and reliable offsite back up.

7)      Remotely email a file to someone else

If you don’t have your computer with you but you get an urgent request for a document, you can email it without even having to download it yourself with the Mozy App.

8)      Back up multiple devices on the same MozyHome account

As lots of us today have more than one device in our homes, you can now backup as many as five computers on a MozyHome account.

9)      Help track your laptop should it get stolen

As well as helping you get your data back in the event that your computer is stolen, we might also be able to help the police locate your device.  If your computer is taken, contact support at Mozy for help.

10)   Transfer an exact copy of your file tree to a new computer when you upgrade

Mozy makes transferring data to a new computer child’s play.  Simply log into your account from your new device to copy over all your files in exactly the same structure.

And one on the way!

11)   Sync your files between your phone, tablet and other computers with Mozy Stash

Mozy Stash is still in beta so didn’t quite make our list but soon users will be able to synchronise documents across their devices with this nifty new feature.

It’s 30 years since the world’s first IBM-compatible PC was unveiled to the world and, my, haven’t things changed?

Back on the 12^th of August 1981, audiences at the Waldorf Astoria in New York gasped at the awesome power of the IBM 5150, which, for a mere $20,000, could offer a maximum of 256kB of memory (assuming, of course, that you boosted the 64kB of memory on the motherboard with three 64kB expansion cards).

Who could have known back then how central to our lives PCs would become?  Who could predict that some of our most precious memories would live on our PCs and that we would become so attached to that information that we’d want everywhere access to it?

Sometimes, the value of the digital information we’ve accumulated over the years isn’t terribly apparent – the PC has quietly picked up more and more roles without us noticing.  But, for many of us, the PC is our address book, photo album, music library, diary, home accounts ledger, home video library and much more.

But, as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben says: “With great power, comes great responsibility.”  And so it is with the PC.  We rely on our computers to store all that precious data.  However, unless you happen to be a government research facility, you’re unlikely to have a ‘supercomputer’ and everyday PCs are prone to everyday errors and occasional failures.  So, rather than hoping your PC is has super powers and relying on it in isolation, back up your information!

You can back up as much as 50GB of data with Mozy for just £4.99 – that’s 200,000 times the memory of the expanded IBM 5150.  Or 125GB (500,000 times) for £7.99.  A trial version is also available with a free 2GB option on MozyHome.

And, if you’re addicted to your PC and want your data at your fingertips everywhere you go, check out our mobile apps which allow you to access all your backed-up data on your Android or Apple mobile devices.