Online backup site Mozy is giving away 50 free year-long accounts to commemorate the official release of their Mac backup client.

To get yours, send a message to techcrunch@mozy.com that answers the question, “Why do you deserve free backup service for your Mac?” Data-loss horror stories are encouraged. The Mozy team will select the fifty best responses and will email the winners instructions to claim their free accounts.

Mozy is a cloud-based alternative to Apple’s Time Machine, which works very well but doesn’t have the added security of off-site data backup. And at $4.99 a month for unlimited storage, the price is couldn’t be much lower.

We covered Mozy’s Mac version last April when it was introduced as beta. The final version of the software has introduced support for Apple Mail and Leopard, along with a host of technical features like bandwidth throttling and compatibility for programs with resource forks.

In addition to local backup solutions like Time Machine, Mozy faces competition from online storage sites such as Apple’s .Mac, Sugarsync, and recently-released Syncplicity. Carbonite, one of the leaders in this space, works on Windows machines but has yet to release a Mac version.

Cliff Shaw, founder of ProtectMyPhotos and DocSyncer, is having an up and down week.

First the bad news. ProtectMyPhotos, which launched in October 2006, is done. They spent $280,000 in seed capital to try to make the idea work, but ultimately they couldn’t compete new backup services like Mozy and Carbonite. Mozy was recently acquired by EMC for $76 million, and Carbonite has raised $21 million in capital.

We’re therefore putting ProtectMyPhotos into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

But Shaw also writes to tell us that his second startup, DocSyncer, is going gangbusters. The product auto-syncs word documents on your hard drive with Google Docs. In the last five days, he says, users have auto-uploaded more than 200,000 new documents to Google Docs via the product, making DocSyncer by far the largest single contributor to Google Docs. The product appears to have legs.

There’s still no guarantee that DocSyncer will make it as a business, but users like the product. That’s a good start, and now Shaw can focus all of his energy on making it work.

Online storage startup Mozy, headquartered in Utah, has been acquired by EMC Corporation, a public storage company with a nearly $40 billion market cap. EMC paid $76 million for the company, according to two sources close to the deal.

We first covered Mozy in January 2006 as part of an overview of the current generation of online storage solutions. The company has a dead simple way for users to back up their computer hard drives online. Download their software (Mozy supports both Windows and Mac machines) and the backups occur slowly over time. If there is ever a problem, you can restore your hard drive from Mozy’s servers.

Mozy’s chief competitor is Carbonite, another company we’ve tracked over the last couple of years. Carbonite has raised $21 million in venture financing.

Mozy, by contrast, raised just $1.9 million in capital. The round, closed in May 2005, was led by Wasatch Ventures, with participation from Tim Draper and Novell co-founder Drew Major.

That’s quite an exit for Mozy – $76 million on just $1.9 million raised. It’s almost identical to StumbleUpon, which was acquired by eBay earlier this year for $75 million after raising just $1.5 million in venture capital.

Rumors circulated a year ago that Mozy was close to being acquired by Google for significantly less than this. The company eventually passed on the deal, which must have been a tough call. They clearly made the right choice in waiting.

Look for an official announcement of the Mozy acquisition in the next few weeks. Congratulations to Josh Coates, Mozy’s CEO (who refuses to comment on the deal), and the rest of the Mozy team.

Mozy is in the news again after announcing a huge enterprise deal with General Electric last week. Today they’ve pushed a Mac version of their desktop backup solution for consumers. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s extremely good.

Previously Mozy and competitor Carbonite were excellent ways of backing up Windows based hard drives. Both are very reasonably priced at about $60/year – Mozy allows 2 GB to be stored for free and charges $5/month for unlimited storage, while Carbonite has a 15 day free trial and then charges $5 per month with discounts for pre-payment. Neither charge for bandwidth.

With both solutions you download and install the software and the service then slowly begins to backup your hard drive based on your settings.

Carbonite still only supports XP (and is a great choice for Windows users). Mozy is the only choice for Mac users and I highly recommend it after my testing. You can make a simple request to back up up the entire hard drive, or get more granular and just back up, say, iTunes and iPhoto.

We’ve been tracking online storage for nearly a year, and for good reason. As the PC becomes the center of our digital lives, having backups of email, photos, videos and music becomes increasingly important. Solutions like Foldershare and USB hard drives help with the problem, but what consumers really need is a dead simple service that backs up your entire hard drive to the Internet regularly.

Boston based Carbonite is the closest to perfection we’ve seen so far. It requires a simple installation, and users choose to back up their entire hard drive or just parts of it. Carbonite then begins the backup process, uploading 2 GB per day over broadband until finished. Files are encrypted, and there is no limit on total storage. If you delete a file, Carbonite keeps it stored for 30 days in case you change your mind. Carbonite monitors files that are changed and backs them up right away.

And if you have a problem and need to get the data downloaded to a reformatted hard drive or new computer, Carbonite will download at up to 15GB per day over broadband until your system is restored.

Carbonite says that one in eight computers have some sort of data failure. The number one reason is user error, although crashes, fires, floods, theft and viruses all play a part as well. The 30 day cache solves the user-error problem and the fact that data is stored on the Internet solves the fire/flood/theft issue (where USB or network drives may also be affected).

Carbonite has a free 15 day trial (with no credit card required). The service costs $5 per month, with discounts if you pre-pay for a year or two.

The next best solution we’ve found is Mozy, which has a 60GB limit on total storage and costs $5 per month for 30 GB of storage or $10 per month for 60GB. The fact that Carbonite has no limit on total storage makes it significantly more attractive than Mozy.

The downside? It only works on Windows PCs (as does Mozy). Mac users are out of luck for now.

It’s clear that Google is thinking along the same lines with Platypus, their online storage solution. There are fewer details on Microsoft Live Drive, but we can expect a compelling offering from them as well. The holy grail for these services is to be built into PCs and offered to users out of the box. It’s a natural revenue stream for Dell, HP, etc., and they could either build it themselves of partner with a company like Carbonite.

Carbonite has received $7 million in venture capital. Until May 2006 they were focused on photo storage, and launched the current service in May.