In a move that would ensure the safety of consumer data, McAfee, one of the world's foremost Internet security providers, Friday announced an unlimited online backup service that would automatically upload data from the hard drive of a user's computer to a remote server.

The new service - McAfee Online Backup - can be availed by US customers via a yearly subscription plan costing $59.99 per PC. McAfee said that the accessibility of the service will be expanded to a number of other countries in the fourth quarter.

McAfee noted that though the online backup service, which will be powered by backup infrastructure from Mozy, will provide users with unlimited file space for backing up their data, the performance to and from the service will largely be dependent on the user's ISP.

McAfee said that with files being encrypted and remotely stored, users can easily restore them in case of a data loss.

In addition, the backup service comes with options like Bandwidth Throttle, to limit how much the use of Internet connection for the data upload; and Backup Speed to allow users to select either fast or slow backups so that there is minimal affect on the performance of the computer.

Greg Sanders, McAfee's director of global online services, said that McAfee Online Backup will work with the company's other security products, as also with suites from other vendors.