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.