ONLINE BACKUP firm Mozy has launched an online PC backup service for consumers and small businesses in Ireland.

Mozy, which has more than one million customers, is introducing its service throughout Europe this year.

The company provides software that allows people to save important files over the internet to a data centre, instead of having to store them on a CD-Rom or USB stick.

The company offers two versions of its backup service. Mozy Home costs €4.99 a month for an unlimited amount of data, whether it is for a handful of files or an entire photo library. A version aimed at small businesses called Mozy Pro costs €3.99 a month per desktop PC and €6.99 a month for a server, each with an additional cost of 50c per gigabyte of data.

Mozy chief marketing officer Russ Stockdale said online backup was useful for protecting users from hardware failure or if they lose their computer. It can also make transferring data easy when upgrading from one computer to another.

Customers can download the backup software from www.mozy.ie. “Once it has been set up it is automated. This is something the average computer user can do,” said Mr Stockdale.

The first backup can often take several hours depending on the amount of data to be saved and the speed of the user’s internet connection. Further backups save only the incremental additions made in the meantime.

Mr Stockdale said users’ data would be safe at all times. “We encrypt data locally on your machine, we will send it over an encrypted link and store it in an encrypted format. The data is not accessible to a search engine crawler,” he said.

The data will be held in a secure data centre in Cork operated by Mozy’s parent company, EMC. If a business computer has a hard-disk crash or is stolen, users can pay a fee and have their data posted back to them on a storage medium such as a CD-Rom or external hard drive, Mr Stockdale said.

Eoin Blacklock, managing director of business backup firm KeepITsafe, welcomed Mozy’s arrival, saying it would help raise the profile of online backup.

He said the online backup market in Ireland was growing strongly because it was still not widely adopted.

Mr Blacklock said Mozy operated primarily at the “DIY” end of the backup market.

“Backup is important, but it’s the restore that counts,” he said.