I use Dropbox, Skydrive, and external HD's stored in remote locations. All my beckups are encrypted with Truecrypt
For music, I use Google Play
For music, I use Google Play
Tesselator said:Downright cheap? I don't think so. What are they, like between $100 and $200 a year? A cheap 3TB HDD is like $90 to $120 and how long will an off-line drive last? I say the physical drive will last 20 years or more if only placed on-line once a month. But I guess a typical person goes about it differently:
I would assume that as they upgrade HDDs to newer faster units or replace them due to a policy based on uptime hours (as in my case), the old ones become the offline storage units. You can look at this as a zero cost investment quite easily. And this is also true for a new users setting it up for the first time when he rotates in the backup units as the replacements when the hour limit is hit. Assuming you use at least 3 identical drives in your system (I use 6 identical ones and one system drive) that's three separate external backups on drives you would be throwing away (or selling for $25) anyway.
That makes the $300 too $500 a cloud service wants over those same three years look pretty expensive to me. Anyway, I personally have so many "monthly payments" (bills mostly) the very last thing I need or want is yet another one. UG!
I think something got lost in translation, as I think we are saying the same thing: a stack of local HDDs (particularly if recycled) is cheaper than paying 'forever' for a Cloud service.
For example, a Cloud service that's $100/year means that one can add $100 worth of HDDs every year and be at 'break even'.
Tesselator said:I don't think the convenience factor is equal either. Sure if it's only a few gigs... but then you wouldn't be keeping it on HDDs. Just throw-away monthly DVDs will do you. But if it's closer to a terabyte then yeah, no way - well unless your safe deposit box is two states away or something. Figure it's about 10min. to your bank and maybe a 1 hour operation all total to retrieve the offsite unit and hook it up. In that time you could download only about 2GB. And that's with the FASTEST bandwidth there is. I mean really, who has more than 120Mb/s connections and who has an ISP which typically offers and supplies more than about 1 or2 MB/s per connection? Like almost no one... right?
This is also a good illustration that "SneakerNet" still isn't dead While ISP connections are pretty good at moving some stuff, when it comes to big data transfers, FedEx'ing a (tape, or) hard drive is still higher bandwidth.
-hh
I think something got lost in translation, as I think we are saying the same thing: a stack of local HDDs (particularly if recycled) is cheaper than paying 'forever' for a Cloud service.
For example, a Cloud service that's $100/year means that one can add $100 worth of HDDs every year and be at 'break even'.
I know you tossed $100 out there just as an example, but online backup is nowhere near that costly. I just pulled up my receipt and see I paid $139.99 for four years of unlimited backups to Crashplan+. So more like $35 a year.
I totally understand if online backup is not a good fit for your usage, but I don't really see the cost as the roadblock given I can get four years of online backup for about the cost of one hard drive.