Berkeley Data Systems Unveils Unlimited Online Storage

The company believes it has "fixed" online storage with a new service that backs up an unlimited number of digital files online for $4.95 per month.

Online data storage provider Berkeley Data Systems on Dec. 14 introduced Mozy Unlimited Backup, a new service that individuals can use to back up an unlimited amount of digital files—documents, photos, video —to a secure, multi-petabyte outside server.

The company offers the first 2GB of storage for no fee, and the unlimited backup—which includes an unlimited number of restores—costs $4.95 per month. Users may select month-to-month or annual payment plans.
Berkeley DS, based in American Fork, Utah, is making the unlimited storage offer available for individual users only at this time. The company expects to release a business version of the service in January. "Since announcing our beta in April, weve grown to more than 100,000 users," said Berkeley DS founder and CEO Josh Coates. "The goal of Mozy is to be super simple for mainstream users but also offer power users advanced functionality. Mozy has always been free, automatic and secure; and now for $4.95 a month, its unlimited." Coates, whose background is in building large-scale parallel systems, told eWEEK that "online storage has been around for 10 years, and no one solution has really worked very well until now." "The feature sets havent been very good, and the business models didnt work very well," Coates said. "We just decided to build online storage of the highest quality possible, and give it away. Then, when our beta program did much better than even we thought it would, we made the decision to charge for a small percentage of our service and created the premium accounts. We feel like online storage was broken, and that we fixed it." Coates said the company hasnt done much marketing or advertising. "We have some small things going on, like Google ads and such, but the growth really has been organic," he said. Mozy Unlimited Backup also includes a major overhaul to its previous restore process. Users can conduct unlimited restores within Windows Explorer by right clicking on a file or folder. Users on the road can access and restore their data via the Mozy Web site. Click here to read about the storage challenges faced by Web-only businesses. Mozy ("The name doesnt really mean anything, we just liked it," Coates said) now also offers consumers the option to order a copy of their data on DVD, shipped next-day air via FedEx. Other features include private key encryption, custom backup scheduling, continuous backup options, bandwidth throttling, block level incremental backups, 30-day file version archives, support for files larger than 2GB, single-instance storage and automatic Microsoft Outlook file detection and backup. Two-year-old Berkeley Data Systems has conducted more than 2.5 million backups in the past month alone. Currently, it has more than 450 million files stored in its high security center. To sign up for the free 2GB storage, go here. Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.