When EMC bought consumer storage vendor Iomega a few months ago, I asked why in this blog. This week, the 800-pound gorilla of the storage industry answered my question, for users at least, by announcing new software bundles for owners of Iomega storage gear. The new bundles, free for new and current Iomega owners by download, include versions of Retrospect and Mozy which came to EMC, like Iomega, through acquisition.

Most interesting is the Retrospect Express bundle that includes a three-step wizard that asks what to backup, where to put it, and when to schedule the backups to run. It can then save to an Iomega disk, Mozy, or both.

Users that need more control, and Mac users, get less integrated bundles.

The Retrospect Express bundle gives you a local backup for fast restores and a remote backup for when the worst happens. It's the first combination we've seen that's easy enough to use for most home users.

I'm still waiting for the small business version that can backup 2-10 servers to a local device, with data deduplication, and a remote site or service. Till then, this is a good first step.