MozyPro’s Data Shuttle Service Ships HDDs to Some Customers

Cloud storage company Mozy rolled out a new service that is now available to its MozyPro (for servers) customers in the U.S. The new service, dubbed “Data Shuttle”, is designed to dramatically shorten the initial backups for its cloud storage customers, from weeks or months to mere days.

So what magical, disruptive technology enables this incredible speed boost? The U.S. Postal Service, or the commercial delivery company of your choice.

Mozy will ship a physical hard drive to customers overnight, so they can plug the drive into their server, run a backup with the MozyPro client, and send the drive back to Mozy (with a Mozy-provided shipping label). Then, the Mozy folks plug the drive into their own data center, and poof--you’re up and running in the cloud.


After the initial backup, Mozy expects that you’ll only need incremental backups, so whatever upload speeds you’re getting from your LAN should suffice.

During that first backup, the MozyPro client will encrypt the data with a key, which the user can designate. Then, Mozy will generate a second, one-time use key that is transmitted to the Mozy data center via SSL and is destroyed once the data is successfully copied to the servers.

The Data Shuttle service is designed for customers who have between 100GB and 8TB of data to store in the cloud. Currently, the service is only available in the U.S., although European customers should keep an eye out for it, as it will be crossing the Atlantic at some point in the foreseeable future. Additionally, as previously mentioned, the Data Shuttle service is for MozyPro server users.

As far as pricing goes, the cost is determined by the “size of the seed per machine being backed up”, according to the Web site. Apparently, the hard drives Mozy is using for the service have 1.8TB of usable space each, according to the pricing chart on the Mozy website (pictured below). A single Data Shuttle device will cost you $275, but it’s only $100 more per additional drive. Thus, the most you’d pay is $575 for four 1.8TB drives totalling 7.2TB.


The cost, of course, will be added to the cost of MozyPro service, which is $3.95 per month plus $0.50 per month for desktops and $6.95 per month plus $0.50 per month for servers.

It might seem odd to begin your journey into cloud storage with a local hard disk, but until network speeds catch up to the cloud storage needs of the masses, Mozy’s Data Shuttle service is something worth checking out.