Hewlett-Packard Co, the world’s leading PC maker, will help sell Symantec Corp’s online backup services. Symantec would look beyond Norton security products and expand its consumer business.

HP would ship its PCs to customers along with the software that offers subscription to an internet-based automatic backup service. The consumers would be offered free trial for a month, to Norton Online backup, a web-based product. The annual subscription after that would be $50.

Norton Online Backup automatically backs up documents, pictures, music, etc to a secured centralised location. The files can be recovered whenever necessary, especially when the hard disk crashes. The files can accessed from any PC that has web access. It also archives the files that have been deleted accidentally. It automatically compresses the files and then backs them up, thus occupying less storage space.

The online backup service is one of many other computing products the company has introduced to up the growth of sales. Symantec’s consumer unit revenue grew 3% this year, a dip from 10% compared to last year. The company has also introduced a service that lets the parents monitor as to how family computers are used. Symantec already has an agreement with HP through which Norton Internet Security Suite is sold.

Consumers like the comfort of buying such programs directly from their PCs. Hence, software companies like such deals and have partnerships with PC makers.