[Lunchbox2]

I use Mozy, which for 50 dollars a year or 5 dollars monthly offers unlimited back up. I think its great.

 

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Lunchbox2 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I use Mozy, which for 50 dollars a year or 5 dollars monthly offers unlimited back up. I think its great.

a small word of caution to those who may not be aware: the offers by these online companies must be understood to be differentiated between "back up" versus "storage." And as for "unlimited," well....


Storage

"Storage" systems are just that: you pay for space, and generally also fees for data transfer in/out. I haven't seen one yet that guarantees against data loss. Cost example from one of the larger public providers: Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) has a tiered pricing system, in the US it starts with prices like

Storage
$0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.100 per GB – all data transfer in
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

So unless your data needs exceed 50 TB, that means $15/month for storage per 100 GB, plus data transfer costs to get it there and access when desired. Sure you can have virtually "unlimited" storage, but it will cost.


Back up

"Back up" systems such as BackBlaze and Mozy operate by having a software client on your computer which handles upload to and restore from their infrastructure. This SW keeps track of the files / folders / partitions / drives which you decide to "back up." First back up sends everything you choose to the cloud storage; subsequent back up actions are incremental (ie only changed or new files).

To be aware of is that only data which is still on your hard drive will continue to be archived on their storage system. Read their terms of service: any files which are determined to no longer be on your drive will be deleted from storage, usually within 20-30 days. They specifically have text making it clear that they are not a storage service for stuff from your external drives.....

This is perfectly sensible, and explains how they offer storage on a business model charging only USD 50-60 per year: they simply are presuming that statistically, most computer users don't have terabytes of disk storage built into their computer, rather most new purchasers are buying laptops with "small" (typically under 250 GB, and IIRC the most common average size sold now in new laptops is around 160) drives. And since they don't back up operating system, combined with fact most folks don't have full drives of data, and data transfer out is generally only required in a small percenttage of operating instances..... their presumption is that most folk only have a small amount of data to be backed up (IIRC, I was told by one of the VCs involved with one company the operating assumption is under 10 GB of data)


If anyone knows of a low-cost unlimited "storage" business, I am all ears, as it were

in the meantime, putting small encrypted disk images with documents, etc on several services is a useful piece of a backup strategy. However, I simply have this aversion to putting some other party's software on my computer which has to do with sending data outward...