Mozy was one of my favorite programs on Windows. It’s an automatic online backup system that worked very well. It was small, easy and just worked. They give you 2GB free or unlimited for $4.95/month which is incredible.

Mozy features:

• Open/locked file support
• 448-bit Blowfish encryption
• 128-bit SSL encryption
• Automatic or scheduled backups
• New and changed file detection
• Block level incremental backups
• Bandwidth throttling
• File versioning
• Public or private key encryption

Well the folk over at Mozy released a beta for Mac today. As soon as I seen the news, I started the install. Install was a breeze and in a few minutes it was searching my hard drive for “Backup Sets” which are pre-determined file types. These include Word and Excel files and Mac specific items such as iCal, Address book, iTunes Library and iPhoto Library. You can also choose individual files and folders if you would like too. I choose my Documents and SItes folders in addition to some Backup Sets as you can see below.

So far I’m only 62% done with my initial backup so I haven’t had a chance to try a restore yet. But if its anything like the Windows client was, it will be easy and seamless. So far I’m impressed by the beta. I haven’t run into any issues yet but I really haven’t done too much yet. The program runs in the menu bar so its out of the way. With 2GB’s of space for free, you really have no reason not to be backing up important files now.

[Mozy Mac Beta page]

Changes in this beta release

• Added support for Windows Media 9 Advanced playback
• Added support for reclaiming file types assumed by other applications
• Improved ASX handling
• Improved support for MPEG 4 playback
• Resolved some issues related to 2-pass VBR encoding
• Resolved manual activation issue
• Resolved Helix streaming server playback issue
• Resolved Save as and Save As QuickTime Movie issue on OS 10.3.9/QT 7.1.2 systems
• Resolved potential for crash when playing back files that have been deliberately modified/damaged
• Improved support for installation using Apple Remote Desktop

Known Issues

• Playback of Windows Media 9 Advanced Simple Profile files on a Mac will playback white but playback correltly on a Windows machine
• Playback of Windows Media 9 Advanced files with display set to 256 colors will playback incorrectly

[Download]

iCOS, IComicsOnSale, released version 1.3 beta of there widget that show which comics are shipping during the week. New features include:

� Current Week/Expected Next Week
� Item Details
� Pull List
� Archives of Previous Weeks
� Add Company/Imprint filters
� Keyboard commands

This is a great full featured widget which supports features like Smart lists, Pull lists and check previous weeks.

[Download here]

In the mist of all the Boot Camp 1.1 news, Parallels released an updated beta (build 1862.2) that fixes the “Unable to allocate virtual machine memory” problem with some Window XP VMs.

Download here

VMware just announced their rumored VMware for Mac OS X this morning. You can shoot over to there webpage to sign up for the beta. Product is not available yet but signing up will get you the beta as soon as its available while the final product looks to be released before the end of the year.

I’m a Parallel’s user myself and alittle excited to see what VMware is going to bring to the table. VMware is a more mature product with features like non-persistant disk mode and multiple freeze states which Parallel’s does not have. I’ve used VMware for years on both Windows and Linux and will probably switch to VMware for OS X just for the simple fact of being able to open images on any system.

While poking around flickr i came across these screenshots of a beta release of Windows Live Mail Desktop. I’m not sure what Microsoft’s plan is here because this is different from Microsoft Mail that comes with Vista. He has a few more pics up here. Now, I’m about one of the most tech savvy people out there but seriously, Microsoft is really confusing the shit out of me with Live and Vista.

Had a chance to install and play around with this a little. Definitely a huge improvement over the beta1 i had installed. UI is refined and usable. You can see a lot of Vista in the UI already. New Setting screen, RSS feeds are more usable tho i do not like the way Microsoft took RSS feeds in IE 7. I prefer the Firefox LiveBookmarks method. In IE7, basically you bookmark the feeds XML file and it formats it into a pretty CSS view ala Sage. While the eye candy is here, rendering is completely hosed in this build. Pages like Digg, Slashdot and Meebo are completely useless as they cant be rendered correctly. I realize this will all be fixed but it makes this build useless for daily use. Its nice to see what changes they have made to IE but this is definitely a install for a day or two then uninstall.

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