Mozy launches online backup tool for Apple Macs

Computerworld - Mozy Inc. today rolled out a hosted backup offering that will allow Apple Macintosh users to store and access personal documents, photos and data.

Geared toward home users and small businesses, MozyHome for Mac costs $4.95 per month for unlimited online storage capacity. The EMC Corp. unit is also offering a free version of the hosted service that is restricted to 2GB of storage, noted Mozy Chief Operating Officer Vance Checketts.

Checketts said Mozy will launch business versions of its Mac hosted backup service called MozyPro for Mac and MozyEnterprise for Mac this summer. Mozy Pro for Mac will cost $3.95 a month and plus 50 cents per gigabyte per month. MozyEnterprise for Mac will cost about 15% more each month, he said.

MozyHome for Mac backs up incremental changes made to files and folders and can be set to run transparently at any time. All Mozy files are protected with 448-bit Blowfish encryption and are transferred to the Web via 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer connection.

Should a Mac system crash occur, Checketts said users can recover up to 30 days' worth of file versions by restoring the data from Mozy software running on their machines, downloading their stored files from Mozy's Web site, or receiving their data on DVDs or hard drives.

EMC gained the online backup service with its acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems Inc., the maker of the Mozy online backup product, for $76 million last fall. The company launched its retooled version of Mozy backup and recovery for Windows PCs and servers in January. The EMC version included technology from its RSA Security Inc. unit.

Although corporate IT operations have been aggressively targeted by online storage vendors, Mac users have complained about being of being left on the sidelines.

According to Checketts, more than 43,000 users tested MozyHome for Mac as part of a product evaluation over the last year.

Don Malm, a consultant for Clifton, N.J.-based RCA Insurance Group and one of those testers, said he first used the hosted backup system of Mozy rival Carbonite Inc. but abandoned it after growing impatient over the lack of Mac support. He upgraded from the free 2GB version of MozyHome for Mac to the monthly unlimited storage version of the service about 60 days ago to satisfy 24GB of backed-up storage.

Malm noted that shortly after subscribing to the Mozy service, a hard drive crashed during an upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard. Mozy quickly sent a DVD that held all of the lost data, he said. "If I had been relying on Time Machine [Apple's native backup and recovery utility], I'd have lost it all when my hard drive [crashed]," remarked Malm.

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