Seriously though, there is this company called SpiderOak that I was
looking into and they look like a good option. They aren't foolish
enough to try offering unlimited storage for $5/month. They actually
base their price on what they can support. Kinda like Suso. ;-) Plus,
they support Linux.
Companies like Mozy that try to offer unlimited backups for
$5.99/month are flawed by design. Hard drive capacity generally follows
the trends of the desktop and if desktop users continue to store more
and more data, then Mozy won't be able to make a profit in the long run
and will have to increase their pricing. Let's say that user's space
requirements double every 4 years (safe estimate). So if they use 1TB
now, you have to pay that off storing that amount within 2 or 3 years to
make a profit. Enterprise storage costs Mozy anywhere from $100/TB on
the low end to $20000/TB on the high end, dpending on their setup, how
well they are backing up, whether they are using a SAN or not, etc.
Let's say its $200/TB because they claim that they are reliable and
offer you something better than you can do yourself. So at $5.99/month,
a user will pay off a TB in 33 months or almost 3 years. But of course,
by that time, the user is now using about 1.8TB and growing fast, so now
Mozy has to upgrade their system to accomodate more storage. All in
all, their profit is quite low and eventually they will either go out of
business (and who knows what will happen to your data) or they will
raise their prices accordingly.
Actually, I wrote all that for nothing. They no longer do unlimited
backup and I heard that this happened. So it was obvious that they
weren't thinking ahead (or it was all just a marketing scam). Either
way, do you want to store your backup data with a company that didn't
plan ahead?
Amazon s3 is actually more expensive per GB than an EMC SAN, which in
my own experience is crazy expensive. So that's not the route to go.
S3 is for small amounts of online data, not large amounts of offline
data.
Please don't let price drive your decision. Remember, $5.99 isn't even
enough to buy popcorn at the movie theater anymore. How can it buy you
unlimited backup storage?
Actually, I recently have come to realize that desktop users are
actually seeing lower prices at the cost of enterprise users. You won't
see this on the consumer market, but enterprise SAN drives can cost as
much as $40,000 for a 400GB SSD drive. Yes, that's 40 thousand dollars.
Most enterprise storage prices are like this and I think its because
Enterprises subsidize the lower cost of consumer stuff. I think that one
of the reasons for this is because it helps keep new companies out of
the market.
Anyways, I'm rambling.
On Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 07:05:23PM GMT, Mark Warner [mhwarner@gmail.com] said the following:
>
> SUSO? :-)
>
> Ben Shewmaker wrote:
> > Does anyone have any recommendations on offsite backup options? I
> > know there are a number of companies with varying offers on price and
> > storage, but a number of them only work with their software (usually
> > windows/pc only). Right now I have an Ubuntu box serving as my NAS,
> > so ideally I'd love to be able to continue to backup to that, then
> > have that box backup to the cloud. I have around 50 gigs of
> > photos/vids/other docs right now that I really need backed up, but of
> > course that will only grow as I take more pictures and videos and
> > whatnot. What about something like Rackspace or Amazon s3? Or they
> > purely enterprise solutions or are they doable and/or affordable for a
> > home user? Or is there some other company that will provide what I
> > need?
> >
> > Thanks!
> > Ben
> > _______________________________________________
> > BLUG mailing list
> > BLUG@linuxfan.com
> > http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
> >
>
>
> --
> Mark Warner
> MEPIS Linux
> Registered Linux User #415318
>
>
>
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> BLUG@linuxfan.com
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>
--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
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