MozyHome Opens the Door for Online Mac Backups

EMC's (NYSE: EMC) Mozy, however, has launched a new online backup solution, MozyHome for Mac, that can protect a customer's most valuable data. The company's Mac version has been available as a beta for nine months, where it's attracted 43,000 beta users. The official release now joins versions for Windows 2000, XP and Vista. However, Mozy's implementation of MozyHome for Mac isn't just a retrofitted Windows application.

Built for Macs

"We've all wanted to prove to the market that EMC is committed to the consumer space and to the Mac," Vance Checketts, chief operating officer for Mozy, told MacNewsWorld. Mozy, he noted, has an engineering team dedicated to the Mac.

"It's not that we took an on-premise software solution and Internet-enabled it," he said. "We built this from the ground up to be optimized for online backups and optimized for the Mac."

Designed as a consumer service, MozyHome for Mac offers 2 gigabytes of online backup free with no expiration date or unlimited online backup capacity for US$4.95 a month.

"It's really pretty easy -- you can go in and say, 'I want all my iPhoto stuff' or you can pick subsets of photos," Checketts explained, noting that users can easily control which files are backed up, even choosing to back up any file with a particular extension, regardless of where it is stored on a user's hard drive.

Built-In Encryption

All files are encrypted with 448-bit Blowfish encryption, and the encrypted files are transferred via a 128-bit SSL (secure sockets layer) connection, which is the same encryption used for online banking. After the initial backup, Mozy only backs up incremental changes to files and folders, meaning that subsequent backups run fast and in the background. Mozy can also be tuned so that it won't engage in an automatic backup if a user's processor is being heavily utilized. That means important work or play won't be interrupted by a scheduled backup if a user is busy pounding away on something else.

In addition to the most recent backup, Mozy keeps 30 days' worth of file versions as well.

"I had just completed my transition from Tiger to Leopard when my hard drive crashed," said Donald Malm, a participant in the MozyHome for Mac beta. "The restore of the all my data from Mozy was completed without a single error. My Quicken data was exactly where I had left off the day before the crash. Never have I made a better purchasing decision since I started in the insurance and financial system design industry 52 years ago."

Mozy or EMC?

EMC bought Mozy last year, which sparked some criticism that Mozy, which was primarily geared for consumers, would be gobbled up by EMC, which primarily serves enterprises. As expected, EMC took some of Mozy's technology and business model and applied it to the enterprise business space, but not, as it turns out, at the expense of everyday consumers.

"I think that whenever an acquisition happens, there are bound to be questions about how well the cultures of the two companies will mesh, and the fact is, EMC isn't the company that you think of when you think of home and consumer products," Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, told MacNewsWorld.

"But what's interesting, Mozy constituted one of the first acquisitions that EMC made in that the company stated very clearly [it] was meant to provide an entry into consumer storage," he explained, noting that EMC fully expects the consumer storage space to grow rapidly as consumers run into the same digital storage management problems that businesses face every day.

Currently, Mozy has about 700,000 users, including 20,000 businesses, and the Utah-based company backs up a cool 6.2 billion files that take up 7.5 petabytes of data, which is the equivalent to 7.8 million gigabytes.

Later this summer, Mozy will release a business version of its Mac service to enhance its MozyPro and MozyEnterprise offerings.