Back in April, Mozy announced a deal to provide backup services for all of GE’s employees — all 300,000 of them — which impressed me enough to start using Mozy’s free offering.

You download a small application, tell it the folders or filetypes you want to back up, with a 2GB limit, and it trickles the updates back to their servers during periods where you’re away from your machine. I’ve used it successfully with Windows and Mac. You agree to accept the occasional promotional email from Mozy-approved advertisers, but I don’t think I’ve gotten any. It’s a great service that simply solves the terrifying backup problem.

Now TechCrunch is reporting that EMC has acquired them for $76m, on just $1.9m in venture capital. Good move for EMC and great news for the Mozy guys, who had earlier rebuffed offers from Google.

I still would like to see an open source version that can use a variety of back-ends including S3; I think that would be an ideal solution. But for now, Mozy!