EMC started a good service in Mozy Home last year, offering offsite storage for Macs and PCs for only $4.95 per system per month. EMC bought Mozy Inc. and PI Corp. in 2007 to bring out the service, the classic tale of a large corporation buying novel assets. All this was rolled out with unlimited storage. But now with precious little warning, Mozy has become PC-centric as it dropped its Home version this week to force Mac users to switch to Mozy Pro, a solution using an under-developed Mac client.

The Mozy Pro software, at least on my systems, is not working worth a damn. About three hours of calls to support and at least as many hours of tests, downloads, library folder emptying and uploads of my log files later, Mozy Pro 1.2.0 simply won’t select what I want to backup. Mozy Home 1.2.0 never had these problems; in fact, it kept working when I’d re-install it on my OS X 10.4.11 system, after Mozy Pro failed.

EMC didn’t give me a choice. On December 3, EMC told all Mozy Home users they’d be frozen out of offsite backup processes by December 10. Switch to Mozy Pro, they told us. I did immediately and found my backup selections either froze the Pro client, or would only let me select nonsense like backing up all of my Pictures and Movies folders — the two biggest on my system, among others. Like lots of independent businesses, I have to push files upstream at a fraction of my download speed. Pictures and movies should be avoided when doing online backups. Online backups are for point solutions, the files that change often — not pictures of mom’s 80th birthday.

I won’t carp on why the default configuration for an online backup service now grabs your biggest sets of files. I think it’s obvious what’s intended when EMC sells Pro storage space at 50 cents a gig per month. So after close to a week, I ended my Mozy services today. There’s a better online backup solution, BackJack, one that understands Mac engineering. Mozy has become so PC-driven that when you sign on for the Pro service, the e-mail link to the client you must install is an .EXE file. That’s sloppy transition, to be generous.EMC also bought up Dantz a few years back, and the future of the company’s Mac solutions for enterprise and independent users has never looked so bleak. When Dantz was creating Retrospect, the software was the gold standard for backups. Now EMC is reduced to promising a Retrospect X, the first re-vamp of the software in more than three years. And Retrospect X has been promised since January, when an EMC rep at MacWorld said it would be available this fall. Instead we get Mozy Pro, which works on my system like its not ready for prime time, delivers less than BackJack, and costs more to operate.

Two years ago I faithfully backed up my Mac systems daily, using Retrospect exclusively. But after one set of unsupported media drives after another, and a massive collection of CD-RW discs stacking up, I went to hard drives and picked up SuperDuper. Now Retrospect gets a single nightly shot a week, instead of all evening and weekend backups. X marks the spot where EMC stumbled in this market. Mozy support has been under fire this week, weathering the complaint calls about just-released client software.

Fellows, if you’re going to yank a service out of customer hands in a week’s time, you need to have a longer testing period for a new client. Especially for the customers you already have got in the fold using a Home version. I got told to uninstall Mozy Home, reboot, install Mozy Pro, reboot again, then try to configure. I got told to wait as much as an hour for the client to find my files to be backed up. I got a lot of advice, but nothing worked as well as my 10-minute download of BackJack for a free 15-day, unrestricted trial.