Monday, September 26, 2011

Mozy Launches Disk Drive-based Transfer Service

Seattle-based Mozy, the online backup and recovery service now owned by EMC, said Friday that it has launched a new service which makes it easier for customers to transfer data to the service. Citing the very slow transfer rate of bandwidth options, Mozy said it has begun a program which will ship a hard drive to users, allow them to back up data, and then ship that hard drive back to Mozy. The new service--Mozy Data Shuttle--will allow users to transfer anywhere from 100GB to 8 terabytes to Mozy. The use of hard drives--similar to a program Amazon also runs--comes directly due to the very slow transfer speed companies are facing in trying to transfer very large data sets to the cloud; current Internet bandwidth is not enough to allow for easy uploading of data, a time that Mozy says can currently take "weeks and even months" for an initial backup. Mozy said the program is available to MozyPro customers, and starts at $275 for up to 1.8 terabytes of data shipped to the company.