Mozy

Online storage is becoming a commodity offering. So you'd think that it'd be simple to buy and use, like an external hard disk. Not so much.

Storage companies are jockeying for position in this market by adding features and complexity. The latest: The backup product Mozy (a subsidiary of EMC) is getting a synchronized folder product that works a lot like Dropbox.

Called Stash, it's a shared folder that will draw space from a user's Mozy account. So if you're using 20 gigabytes for backup in a 50GB Mozy account, you'll be able to … Read more

PRAGUE--Avast isn't content with merely 130 million active Windows users. In addition to expanding its security offerings for the PC, the company plans to move at least some of its threat definitions to the cloud, while introducing a personal VPN and debuting an Android app with some features only for rooted phones.

Avast Chief Technical Officer Ondrej Vlcek spoke to CNET during a recent tour of the company's virus lab about what the company had planned. Vlcek, who has been with Avast for 16 years and wrote the company's first Windows product, said that Avast looks to … Read more

Hot on the heels of its iOS counterpart, online backup service Mozy just released an app for Android. That's a major perk for anyone already using the service to archive their data.

Mozy, of course, is the quiet desktop tool that automatically copies your critical files to the cloud. I've been a user for years, and just this week I had to take advantage of it after a sudden system failure. Worked like a charm.

The app, which is free, enables you to access your files on the run. You can, for example, retrieve Word and Excel documents, … Read more

iPhone owners who store files online through Mozy can now access those files remotely courtesy of the company's new iPhone app.

Released last week for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, the mobile version of Mozy allows users of the service to retrieve and view their online files directly on their mobile devices. Before you can use Mozy on the iPhone, you need to set up a Mozy account and then install the client software on your computer from where you back up your files. Once that's done, you can access any of those files on your mobile … Read more

Mozy, the online backup service, is testing out a bit of technology offered by rival DropBox: file synchronization.

The company started telling customers today that it's begun closed beta testing of the sync feature, which will let files stored on one machine automatically be replicated on another. It's a big advancement over Mozy's bread-and-butter of file backup, transforming the service into something people actively use rather than run passively in the background. It also dovetails with the multicomputer subscription plans Mozy introduced in January at the same time it announced it's ditching unlimited-data backup.

Also taking … Read more

Mozy, the online backup service provider and EMC subsidiary, plans to announce today that it's dumping its subscription permitting customers to store unlimited data.

The reason is not hard to guess: with ever-growing quantities of photos and videos, the unlimited plan is financially unsustainable, the company said. In other words, it's my fault.

You see, I'm a Mozy customer. I spent $82 for a two-year subscription and started inflicting my hundreds of gigabytes of photos and increasingly videos as well. I'm a photo nerd, so each 21-megapixel photo in raw format sucks up something like 20MB … Read more

EMC's Mozy online backup service just got a lot more compelling--because it's not just online anymore.

Version 2.0 of the cloud backup service, released late Monday, adds a very useful option to store your data on an external hard drive, too. Storing data remotely is well and good, but a local backup is easier if you need to restore files, and setting it up was as easy as plugging in a drive and telling the software to use it. External USB drives are economical these days--less than $100 for 1TB--and it's nice not having to configure … Read more

The company that's known for giving you access to the Internet now also wants to be entrusted with storing your personal files.

Comcast, one of the biggest Internet service providers in the U.S., on Thursday launched its online backup service called Secure Backup & Share for its high-speed Internet customers. This service is powered by Mozy, a known online backup provider currently owned by EMC. It was a CNET Webware 100 winner of 2009.

According to Mozy, some 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States every week. Files can also be lost other ways, too, including … Read more

Online-backup company Backblaze (Windows | Mac) announced on Tuesday that it has opened its service up to businesses. Backblaze will charge companies a flat fee of $50 per computer per year.

Backblaze's service mimics other, more popular services like Mozy (Windows | Mac) and Carbonite (Windows). Users need only to download its uploading software to their computers and create an account. Once complete, Backblaze starts backing up the contents of the user's computer to its data center.

Backblaze backs up all files on the computer, except for the operating system, temporary files, apps, or files over 4GB in size. Uploading … Read more