Comcast will bundle online storage capacity from EMC’s Mozy division with its broadband service and let residential subscribers share the content they store with friends — or with the entire Internet.

With the new Secure Backup & Share feature, users of Comcast high-speed Internet automatically get 2GB of space in Mozy’s data centers for backing up any data from their home computers. They can also buy 50GB for US$4.99 per month or $49.99 per year, or 200GB for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, the companies announced Thursday. The feature is available now.

Mozy has been offering cloud-based backup capacity to consumers and businesses for several years. Consumers can buy unlimited storage for $4.95 per month. But the new offering with Comcast marks the first time Mozy has let users share the data they have backed up, according to Vance Checketts, Mozy vice president of operations at EMC. The company hopes to extend this capability to its own service as well as to the Mozy-based backup services already offered by Vodafone and China Telecom.

For many consumers, a service such as Secure Backup & Share could be an obvious way to start protecting their data from disasters and hardware failures for the first time, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT.

“For most people, backup is something that they plan to get around to, like losing weight or eating right,” King said. However, it’s more critical than those users may think, he added. “Tens of thousands of hard drives crash on a weekly basis,” he said. Ideally, consumers should also back up their data to a hard drive they own, both to have another copy for safety and because downloading 200GB of remotely backed-up content over a home broadband connection would take a long time, he added.

With the sharing feature, users could make any or all of the files they back up available to family, friends or the public. Theoretically, a user could copy 200GB of files onto Mozy and make them all searchable and available on the Internet, Mozy’s Checketts said. In reality, users may designate some content as public but share the rest through invitations to specific authorized users, he said. Sharing is a natural extension to Mozy’s backup service, and the business issues of adding it would be more significant than the technical ones, Checketts said.

However, it could be a big undertaking just for Mozy to support the Comcast service. If all of Comcast’s roughly 15.9 million high-speed Internet subscribers simply took advantage of the 2GB of free storage, Mozy would need 30 petabytes of storage to accommodate them. Mozy already has more than 25 petabytes of data under management. The company beefed up its data centers in advance of the Comcast offering and can rapidly expand its capacity if needed through contracts with suppliers of bandwidth, storage space and other components, Checketts said.

This service is awesome for multiple reasons, including:

• Data backup – Comcast customers will be able to back up their essential files to a remote, secure location via the Internet. All Comcast customers will receive a complementary 2GB account with their subscription, with additional storage plans available.
• Online access – Comcast customers’ backed-up files can be accessed and restored via the Internet – any time, anywhere.
• Sharing – Once their data is backed up, users will be able to share photos, documents, music, and videos with family and friends via an easy-to-use dashboard that’s available across multiple devices.

• MozyHome $15 off of an annual subscription plus 1 Free Month
• MozyHome $30 off of a biennial subscription plus 3 Free Month

This Great Offer Ends November 30, 2009. So Sign up today and start backup now!

*** Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. The name “Black Friday” was to be given because retail stores operated in “the red” until this extremely busy day in which they’d sell enough merchandise to record a profit (or be “in the black”).  The sales usually start on Black Friday morning bright and early, and run through Saturday.

*** Cyber Monday is the Monday following Thanksgiving. This has grown to be a huge day for online sales. Because much of the population shops online while at work, they wait until Monday, and avoid the Black Friday crowds, ordering the items online instead.

Mozy’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 Mozy 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

Mozy 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.

eYun, which means e-Cloud in Chinese, is a cloud-based online backup service offered and operated in China. Bringing together China Telecom Co., Ltd Shanghai Branch and Decho’s Mozy service, the joint offer targets the vast number of Internet users in China. eYun online backup offers customers offsite protection of their critical information from computer crashes, data corruption, viruses, human error and disasters. The two companies will bring their respective marketing resources and distribution channels to ensure the long term success of the service in China.

eYun is based on Decho’s Mozy online backup service, which serves over 1 million users around the world and protects over 15 petabytes of customer information. The companies recently completed a successful trial with around 15,000 users and are now offering the service broadly.

“China Telecom Co., Ltd Shanghai Branch is glad to team up with EMC’s Decho to offer the eYun service. It is a joint effort from two market leaders with Shanghai Telecom the leader in Shanghai’s broadband market and Mozy the leader in online backup,” said Dr. Qian Ming Hai, general manager of the Internet Division of China Telecom, Shanghai Branch. “eYun is a major step for Shanghai Telecom to evolve from a telecom infrastructure provider to an end-to-end information service provider.”

“China is now the largest Internet market in the world,” said Harel Kodesh, CEO of Decho Corp. “We’re delighted to partner with China Telecom, the largest broadband provider in China, to deliver a world-class online backup service to the Chinese market through eYun.” The companies are also laying the foundation for additional “personal cloud” services to be delivered in the future for both consumers and business customers.

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.”

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.

Mozy Home

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

So starting tomorrow, Mozy will be giving away a FREE 1-year MozyHome subscription ($54.45 value!) to a randomly chosen entrant each Friday. 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/H35Zl)

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

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

“Contrary to past experience, small and medium-size business IT spending will decline more than enterprise IT spending as small businesses bear more of the pain from the housing sector collapse and the financial crisis,” said analyst Andrew Bartels in a May 2009 Forrester Research Inc report titled “US Enterprises Versus SMB IT Budgets in 2009.” In addition, Gartner recently reported the loss of intellectual property or customer data was the number one concern of North American organizations surveyed by Gartner in 2007 and 2008.

Tostevin Accountancy, an accounting, tax, fiduciary, financial planning, and business consulting firm headquartered in Monterey, CA, had been using a tape backup system that it found unreliable and consumed too much valuable office space. It also needed a solution that would work automatically and support Microsoft Exchange. Tostevin reduced its corporate backup costs by 84 percent after they switched from a tape backup provider to MozyPro.

“Our previous solution required a significant investment upfront for both hardware and software, plus costs associated with required maintenance,” said Dennis Forest, CPA at Tostevin Accountancy Corporation. “MozyPro’s inexpensive price and minimal management times made it the natural choice for us.”

MozyPro’s benefits are also being realized by banks. The State Bank of Geneva was spending several hours per week managing on-premise data backups and moving backup media off-site. “The simplicity of Mozy is great for a small business,” said Rick Razum, IT Director for the State Bank of Geneva. “However, its features are so enabling and well-designed that Mozy is ideal for larger companies as well. The quality of product for an affordable rate is unmatched.”

“In addition to the significant cost savings that can be achieved with MozyPro, accounting and financial firms recognize Mozy’s market leadership in data protection,” said Daniel Royer, MozyPro manager at Decho Corp. “These firms can now focus on their business knowing that their important digital information is secure.”

For additional information about how Mozy helps accounting and financial services professionals protect valuable data and perform an accounting backup for an affordable price, visit www.mozy.com/pro. Mozy, the most trusted online backup solution for consumers and businesses, serves more than 40,000 business customers and more than 1 million users. Mozy customers back up more than 15 petabytes of data to Decho’s professionally managed world-class data centers.

MozyPro Best Coupons

With SugarSync’s Android application, you can:

• Retrieve and view files from any computer
• Browse local and remote data
• Send files and share folders directly from your phone
• Upload mobile photos from your phone to SugarSync account and view all photos stored in SugarSync account

If you use a netbook — rest easy knowing that despite limited storage space — you will never have to leave your digital life behind. Setting up SugarSync makes using a netbook a snap. Just by downloading our application, you can instantaneously organize, manage, share and access all of your desired files without needing any additional hardware. Netbooks are projected to reach over 30 million users, and we are excited take part in bringing mobile communications into the future!

With SugarSync for Android, we’ve further extended our industry leading mobile coverage — adding this latest application to our widely used applications for iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows mobile devices. Our goal is to make it simple to save, sync and access all of your photos, music and documents, anytime, anywhere.

SugarSync Free 30-Day Trial

Students and faculty are creating and accumulating an ever-growing body of valuable digital information in the form of lesson plans, research papers, homework and enrollment records, all of which need to be protected. Financial support is the lifeblood for all of academia; however, many educational institutions are currently experiencing budget cuts and a significant reduction in endowment income. This decrease in funding is affecting all departments, including IT. As a result, online backup solutions such as MozyPro(R) are becoming an increasingly attractive option because the institution pays only for the storage spaced used and requires no upfront investment.

“Protecting the information, research and intellectual capital generated by our faculty and staff is of the utmost importance,” said Barbara Sutcliffe, manager of business operations at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. “Like so many schools today, we are looking for solutions that are affordable, reliable and easy to use. While the cost of Mozy is minimal, the peace of mind it provides is priceless.”

Partnering with MozyPro has also helped the University of San Francisco substantially reduce the total cost of ownership of a data backup solution. Without MozyPro, the university would have spent in excess of $60,000 on hardware and software alone, not including labor, staffing and training costs. By using MozyPro, USF saved nearly 60 percent of its annual file backup costs. They are also able to perform their file recovery tasks five times faster than before. The extra hours allow the team to focus more on the needs of the university faculty and staff and less on technical demands.

“In the current economic environment, most universities have lost some level of principle in their capital investments; others are having their operating budgets cut, and still others are facing enrollment declines,” said Walter Petruska, information security officer at the University of San Francisco. “Against this backdrop of reduced budgets and uncertain revenues, the high startup and continuing operational costs involved in building your own backup/recovery solution can be avoided by using MozyPro.”

Backup of faculty and staff computers may be managed via the web-based MozyPro Administrative Console which saves valuable time and frees up already overstretched IT managers. This allows IT staff to focus on more important projects critical to university operations. A single administrator can configure and deploy the MozyPro backup software and centrally manage hundreds or thousands of users.

“Mozy saves educational institutions money, provides world-class protection and allows students and teachers to focus on what’s most important–education” said Dave Robinson, vice president of Mozy marketing at Decho Corp. “In this economy, educational institutions are being asked to do more with less, and Mozy allows these institutions to realize the benefits of an easy to use, secure and scalable backup infrastructure with very little upfront investment.”

For additional information about how Mozy helps educational institutions save money on backup for student, faculty and staff computers, visit http://www.mozy.com/education. Mozy, the most trusted online backup solution for consumers and businesses, serves more than 30,000 business customers and more than 1 million users. Mozy customers back up more than 15 petabytes of data to Decho’s professionally-managed, world-class data centers.