All-You-Can-Store Online Mac Backup Goes Beta

A small Utah online backup service that recently signed a deal to back up 300,000 PCs owned by General Electric Co. Thursday announced a US$4.95 per month unlimited plan for Mac owners.

Berkeley Data Systems Inc., better known as the company behind the Mozy and MozyPro backup services for Windows PCs, launched the first public beta of Mac Mozy today. A limited beta with about 1,000 testers preceded the launch.

"The public beta was built by Mac engineers who understand the needs of the Mac community," said Josh Coates, company CEO.

Mac Mozy lets users choose between a Mozy encryption key and a private encryption key to secure the data uploaded to the American Fork, Utah company's servers. Both incremental backups and block-level differentials are supported, and the service leverages Mac OS X's Spotlight search application; users can select files and folders to back up from Spotlight.

The service requires an Intel- or PowerPC-equipped Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Beta testers can sign up for the $4.95 per month all-you-can-store plan, or the free-of-charge service that limits storage to 2GB.

A Mac Mozy account can be created at, and the necessary software downloaded from, the Berkeley Data site.

Berkeley Data, which unveiled its unlimited online backup for Windows users in December, competes with the likes of Carbonite in the PC market.