Symantec recently announced an agreement with HP to pre-install Norton Online Backup on all HP consumer desktop and notebook PCs worldwide. New users will receive a 30-day free trial of the service, limited to 5 GB of storage.

"This isn't the first such deal Symantec has done with HP," notes PC World's Chris McMillan. "The hardware maker already ships a 60-day trial version of Norton Internet Security with its PCs. Symantec's Norton group has sold desktop backup software for years, but the company has recently pushed into the online backup market. Last year, it acquired SwapDrive, a popular provider in this space."

"Symantec says it has more than eight million customers for its cloud backup service and experiences three million backups per day," writes The Register's Chris Mellor. "Backups can be run automatically or on user-defined schedules. The data is encrypted, and compressed and block-level incremental backups help to reduce the amount of bytes sent over the network link. Uploaded files can be accessed anytime and anywhere through a website, and backups can be performed for up to five PCs through a central account."

More here from Geek.com ... more here from VNUnet ... and the press release is here.

© cloneofsnake

Concentric recently introduced Concentric Managed Backup, a hosted service designed specifically for small and medium sized businesses. The service is powered by EVault backup and recovery technology from i365.

"The service backs up new and changed data at the block level, compresses and encrypts the data and automatically transmits it to one of Concentric's data centers where it is ultimately deduplicated and stored," writes InfoStor's Kevin Komiega. "Customers can then access, manage and restore data over the Web."

"CMB is designed to address the challenges small companies face with unbridled data growth, disaster recovery, offsite data protection and regulatory compliance," writes SmallBusinessComputing's Lauren Simonds. "Another challenge is to do this on a tight budget, which of course is a major benefit of using any Web-based service: you don't have to buy or maintain any additional hardware infrastructure."

More here from bMighty ... and the press release is here.

WD (a.k.a. Western Digital) this week introduced its new 4TB My Book Studio Edition II dual-drive storage system designed specifically for the Mac.

"While it's no looker, it does features a RAID 0 configuration and Firewire 400/800, eSata and USB 2.0 interfaces," writes GadgetReview's Christen da Costa. "Inside are two 2TB hard drives with WD GreenPower technology for power savings and fanless operation."

"The potential speed of the drive is helped through the quad interface, which also returns for the 4TB capacity," according to Electronista. "Mac users ideally attach the drive using FireWire 800 but also have the choices of FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. Those with expansion cards, or Windows users with the ports built-in, can also use eSATA."

"WD says it comes with automatic and continuous backup software, and is user-serviceable, meaning that owners can open the enclosure and replace failed or old drives," writes The Register's Chris Mellor. "There is a capacity gauge to show at a glance how much space is available in the system, and a five-year limited warranty."

More here from Wired ... more here from TrustedReviews ... more here from infoSync ... and the press release is here.

Iomega this week released the new Iomega eGo Portable Hard Drive for the Mac, which boasts multiple interfaces and up to 500GB of capacity.

"Featuring both flavors of FireWire and USB 2.0 connectivity, the new Iomega eGo Portable Hard Drive is ideal for Mac fans that want to take their files anywhere with the assurance of compatibility no matter which interface is needed," says Iomega president Jonathan Huberman.

Gizmodo's Wilson Rothman is impressed by its speed. "I tested it against other drives using a 1.04GB file (an MPEG-4 rip of my Burn After Reading DVD)," he writes. "When I copied that file to a nice SanDisk Extreme III SDHC card, via an ExpressCard SanDisk SDHC reader, it took 1 minute 48 seconds. When I moved it to an old USB 2.0 IDE drive, the same file took 38 seconds. On a PC, I moved that file to a newer USB 2.0 drive, and it took longer, 52 seconds. When I moved that file from the Mac to the eGo via FireWire 800, it took just 15 seconds."

"The eGo for Mac is available in 250GB capacity ('Alpine White,' $99.99 list), 320GB capacity ('Midnight Blue,' $109.99) and 500GB capacity ('Ruby Red,' $149.99)," writes PC Mag's Joel Santo Domingo. "All three have a three-year limited warranty, and should be available in retail stores and online now."

More here from Crave ... and the press release is here.

Amazon Web Services today announced a limited beta of AWS Import/Export, a service which allows Amazon S3 users to ship large sets of data to the provider, rather than attempting to upload them over slow Internet connections.

"AWS lets users transfer data directly onto and off of storage devices, bypassing the Internet, accelerating the migration of significant data sets to the cloud," writes The WHIR's David Hamilton. "For instance, even on a T1 connection it would take more than 80 days to upload just 1TB of data. AWS also notes that Import/Export is more cost effective than upgrading connectivity."

"I don't want to believe that faster networks are a lost cause, or that we'll have to resort to the mail for delivery to the cloud, but as a stopgap measure this offering says a lot about the state of our pipes," writes GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham.

More here from ComputerWeekly ... more here from Gizmodo ... and the announcement is here.

NetApp today announced plans to purchase Data Domain for approximately $1.5 billion.

"This combination is a great opportunity for both NetApp and Data Domain," says NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven. "Data Domain is an innovative high-growth company with a complementary product line ideally suited for multi-vendor environments where customers want to minimize their use of tape for backup. NetApp has the distribution channels and international reach to offer Data Domain products to more customers, accelerating growth and market adoption. The combination of our two companies will increase NetApp's reputation for delivering both outstanding efficiency and operational breakthroughs to customers worldwide."

"NetApp, along with EMC, appear to be among the winners amid data center overhauls," writes ZDNet's Larry Dignan. "By playing nice with various giants - HP, IBM, Cisco and Dell to name a few - these independent storage vendors appear poised to tag along no matter what architecture ultimately wins."

More here from The Register ... more here from Computerworld ... more here from the WSJ ... and the press release is here.

California-based app4mac has launched the beta of its online backup solution for Mac OS X, Twin 1.0.

"Twin is built on the code base for Persistence, and supports FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, and MobileMe, along with AES-256 encryption and bz2 compression," writes Mac Observer's Jeff Gamet. "It preserves Finder information, ACLs, privileges and resource forks, and lets users schedule backup times, set which files to include, and more. Twin 1.0 will be priced at €29 (about US$38.38) when the final version is available on May 14."

More here from MacNN ... more here from O'Grady's PowerPage ... and the press release is here.

Seagate this week introduced the Seagate Replica, an automated backup system for Windows.

"Seagate's new Replica drive aims to be for PC users what Time Machine is for Macs (in fact, there's no Mac software included), and seems to do a pretty good job of it," writes Engadget's Paul Miller. "You merely plug the drive into your computer, accept a license agreement, and you're off to the races with hassle-free incremental backups of your system."

"The Replica, which will become generally available in May 2009, features both single and multiple-PC models. The multi-PC version, with 500GB capacity, includes a dock and is available for $199.99," writes eWeek's Chris Preimesberger. "The single-PC version (250GB capacity) is available for $129.99."

"There's no excuse these days not to back up data," writes the NYT's Stephen Williams. "There are less expensive alternatives to the Seagate product, if that makes sense in your situation. But avoiding the issue is not an option."

More here from PC World ... more here from the Gadgeteer ... more here from VNUnet ... more here from VentureBeat ... more here from SlashGear ... and the press release is here.

Western Digital this week released My DVR Expander, an external hard drive specifically designed for use with TiVo DVRs. Two versions are available: a 1 TB drive for $200 (or $167.70 on Amazon), and a 500 GB drive for $130 (or $112.09 on Amazon).

"The unit is designed to work with TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD digital video recorders," writes Crave's Dong Ngo. "Apart from TiVo, it has also been tested to work with Scientific Atlanta's Explorer 8300 series DVRs, which includes the 8300, 8300 HD, 8300 MR, and 8300 HD-MR models."

"The external eSATA drive allows any number of HD DVRs to record an extra 120 hours of HD content, but the real noise is that it's certified to work with the TiVo HD and TiVo XL, which have locked-down eSATA ports that prevent you from using just any drive," writes Engadget HD's Nilay Patel. "(The original Series3 doesn't have this restriction.)"

More here from Computerworld ... more here from Ubergizmo ... and the press release is here.

Decho has upgraded its MozyHome offering to include the following additional functionality:

Search functionality has been added to the restore tab of the Mozy client

Restore sets based on file types have been added (a customer can restore all their pictures without having to search for them)

When a customer gets a new computer, Mozy automatically associates itself with the new machine so the customer doesn't have to upload the files again or associate them again with the Mozy backup

It's a timely announcement - the company also recently shared the story of a passenger on US Airways Flight 1549 whose data was preserved thanks to the service...

...and for On Storage readers, the company is offering a 15 percent
discount on monthly, annual and biannual subscriptions to MozyHome
Unlimited - just use the promotional code "on-storage" before July 1st!