Aol Unveils Xdrive's 5gb Free Storage For Mac
Turtle 1.1.1 beta for mac. AOL LLC launched the first Mac version of its free online storage service, Xdrive, by unveiling a public beta written for the new Adobe AIR platform. The move pits the online media company against storage giant EMC Corp. In the battle to give away storage 'in the cloud' to Macintosh users. Xdrive Desktop Lite runs on AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), Adobe Systems Inc.'
S new runtime that. AIR, which takes the functionality of Web-based technologies like Flash and HTML and then combines them with desktop-style APIs such as drag-and-drop, is Adobe's attempt to bridge the online-offline gap. Further reading: AOL's beta client was one of the first AIR applications to hit the street Monday. 'By deploying this application on Adobe AIR, we have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes to upload a file, and implemented simple drag-and-drop technology,' David Liu, an AOL senior vice president, said in a statement. The availability of Xdrive Desktop Lite marks the first time Mac owners have been able to access the service's free 5GB of storage space, which has long been available to Windows users. For $9.95 per month, or $99.50 annually, AOL will set aside 50GB of storage rather than the 5GB free allotment. Users armed with an AOL e-mail address or AIM screen name can register with Xdrive to open a free 5GB account, the company said.
Alternately, consumers can register using any e-mail address through AOL's Bluestring photo-sharing site. The installation downloads for both can be found on the Xdrive site.
Aol Unveils Xdrive's 5gb Free Storage For Macbook Pro
AOL is not the only player in the Mac online storage arena. Provides the integrated iDisk and 10GB of online storage as part of the $99.95-per-year.Mac service., for example, while EMC's MozyHome service gives users 2GB of space for free.
Like Xdrive Desktop Lite, EMC's MozyHome is in beta. Just last month, a hosted backup and recovery service for Windows based on the Mozy technology, which it acquired in September for $76 million.
Free Storage For Mac
Today rolled out a hosted backup offering that will allow Apple Macintosh users to store and access personal documents, photos and data. Geared toward home users and small businesses, MozyHome for Mac costs $4.95 per month for unlimited online storage capacity. The EMC Corp. Unit is also offering a free version of the hosted service that is restricted to 2GB of storage, noted Mozy Chief Operating Officer Vance Checketts. Checketts said Mozy will launch business versions of its Mac hosted backup service called MozyPro for Mac and MozyEnterprise for Mac this summer.
Mozy Pro for Mac will cost $3.95 a month and plus 50 cents per gigabyte per month. MozyEnterprise for Mac will cost about 15% more each month, he said. Further reading: MozyHome for Mac backs up incremental changes made to files and folders and can be set to run transparently at any time. All Mozy files are protected with 448-bit Blowfish encryption and are transferred to the Web via 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer connection. Should a Mac system crash occur, Checketts said users can recover up to 30 days' worth of file versions by restoring the data from Mozy software running on their machines, downloading their stored files from Mozy's Web site, or receiving their data on DVDs or hard drives. EMC gained the online backup service with its of Berkeley Data Systems Inc., the maker of the Mozy online backup product, for $76 million last fall.
The company of Mozy backup and recovery for Windows PCs and servers in January. The EMC version included technology from its RSA Security Inc. Although corporate IT operations have been by online storage vendors, Mac users about being of being left on the sidelines. According to Checketts, more than 43,000 users tested MozyHome for Mac as part of a over the last year. Don Malm, a consultant for Clifton, N.J.-based RCA Insurance Group and one of those testers, said he first used the hosted backup system of Mozy rival but abandoned it after growing impatient over the lack of Mac support.
He upgraded from the free 2GB version of MozyHome for Mac to the monthly unlimited storage version of the service about 60 days ago to satisfy 24GB of backed-up storage. Malm noted that shortly after subscribing to the Mozy service, a hard drive crashed during an upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a. Mozy quickly sent a DVD that held all of the lost data, he said. 'If I had been relying on Apple's native backup and recovery utility, I'd have lost it all when my hard drive crashed,' remarked Malm.