Via TechCrunch, news that Mozy, an online-storage service, has scored a huge contract with GE to provide backup services for all of GE’s 300,000-some employees. Pretty good for a little Utah startup in a very crowded space.As I’ve written before, I’ve been following the online storage for a while and I’m surprised that it isn’t more mature. The market, which seems like a no-brainer, really has not yet taken off. Who doesn’t need it? Mozy’s version of online storage is focused very narrowly on backup; competitors also offer shared workspaces, synchronization between machines, and so on.

Players in this market include Xdrive, ElephantDrive, DriveHQ, Box.net, Streamload, and many many others. Omnidrive is especially interesting. Joyent offers Strongspace and BingoDisk.  The latter, based on WebDAV is cheap ($20/year for a basic account) but the WinXP implementation of the WebDAV protocol essentially renders it unusable.

Mozy is venture-backed, including investment from Drew Major formerly of Novell, and offers several tiers of service. The cheapest is free for two gigs of backup, in return for the occasional spam email. That seems like a fair trade-off, but a little cheesy. I avoided Mozy because of that, but they also have non-spam paid options. They have a client (Windows and Mac) that backs up selected folders in the background. Apparently the service works well, although there have been some complaints about the restore process being too cumbersome.

Getting GE’s imprimatur is a huge coup, though, and it’s made me look at them again. My own solution consists of a mirrored RAID array with nightly backups via SyncBack (which I love) to a NAS device. For offsite storage I’ve been doing weekly backups of TrueCrypt (which I’m afraid of) encrypted volumes via FTP to a hosted site that I have space on. But that’s a pain to set up and it feels fragile; and I can’t believe that the broader public is ever going to put up with things like configuring TrueCrypt. So I’m going to check out Mozy.

The most promising offering is Amazon’s S3 service, which simply offers raw storage. I haven’t seen any good, stable, usable front ends for this yet, although JungleDisk, S3 Backup, and S3Fox (a Firefox extension) look like they have potential. I’ve played with S3 a bit and it’s cheap and reliable but I’d really like some solution that makes S3 appear as a part of my native file system. Perhaps open source? That would be sweet.

See also Fred Wilson, Jeremy Zawodny (also here), TechCrunch, here, and here.