Fred’s Notes

I have a MacBook laptop that I want to backup. What should I do? Normally, I will buy a decent disk (500G or 1T SATA are very affordable these days) and I will normally use something like TimeMachine. Happy, joy. Now, I want more. What if I don’t want to spend more money with a second drive, deal with RAID and choose a storage service “in the cloud” for backing up the backup? What if want to access some files from everywhere? There is Amazon S3 (cheap, copy&forget). There is a lot of services and there is Mozy ($4.95 for unlimited storage). Hmm, I have unmetered ADSL @ home. So I’ve signed up and there we go, started the backup. Of course, my ADSL has 512K of upstream limit. Slow has hell. But I only want 12G “in the cloud”. I’ve waited and it took me more than 1 week to upload all the stuff to Mozy (mostly at night). That’s a pain in the ass. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to guess that what is pulling down the real adoption of online backup services (or storage) for SME’s and home users is the ridiculous upload speeds of most of the broadband pipes over there (I’m not talking about South Korea, Japan or some lucky FTTH beta-testers). But I have an idea. What about Mozy sending me a disk so I can do an initial backup just before sending it back to them? That could speed up things. I could even burn a DVD and send to them (for some initial digital media, for example). Mozy has an option for restoring files. They burn a DVD and send it to you with the files as long as you pay the Fedex bill. What about sending the user a big disk for the initial backup. For a 500G drive sent in the mail, 3 or 4 days for arriving at the datacenter is way faster than an 512k upload. Netflix + backups, anyone?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Business, Cloud, Storage.