Mozy online backups for business users comes to the Mac

Storage vendor EMC – also the parent company of VMware – has extended the paid version of its online backup service, Mozy, to Apple Macs with a client for Mac OS X. The free version, MozyHome, was already available in an OS X version, but it's now been joined by its larger-capacity fee-based sibling MozyPro. The client software is still in beta testing.

Using MozyPro, companies can perform on-line backups of desktop computers, servers and notebooks across both Windows and Macintosh. MozyPro for the Mac also includes a 24-hour telephone hotline and support for network drives, iCal, email and more.

The basic Mozy service allows 2GB of data to be backed up. The paid version starts at $4.95 per month and allows unlimited backups for one computer. MozyPro is $3.95 plus 50¢ per GB per month for desktops and $6.95 plus 50¢ per GB for servers, and customers need one licence per computer. For Windows, MozyPro offers specific support for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, VMware and ActiveDirectory and can use Volume Snapshot Services (VSS) – also known as ShadowCopy – to take instant "snapshots" of a filesystem.

Although there are multiple online backup services around today, not all are equal. As heise online investigated in May this year, some suffer from serious security problems – which are more worrying given that many service providers use the same back-end software. EMC, parent company of Mozy, is one of the largest vendors in this sector and Mozy fared well in our testing.

Looking at other online backup services, not all are free and relatively few support the Mac. Of those that do, Mozy's rivals include iDrive -– which had problems in our testing – as well as BlackJack and FileBanc. Apple's own MobileMe service (formerly known as .Mac) includes online backups as well as email, web and photo-gallery hosting and data-synchronisation services.

(lghp)