Quick Review of Online Storage Providers
I’ve been running out of hard drive space. More frequently than I’d like
Not surprising that 80 gig ain’t cutting it with a few iMovies here and there, 12 days of podcasts, piles of photos, and all the projects in development.
Inspired by Om and Niall’s Online Storage conversation and the TechCrunch online storage survey, I thought I’d take a look myself.
For the most part, all these providers are offering far far less storage than I have locally. A small handful of gigs. Not enough. I don’t want to decide what’s backed-up, it just want it backed up. All of it. For that, I need the size of the hard drive plus say, 20%. A 100 Gb.
Anything less just isn’t worth it.
I found 3 providers talking these numbers:
- Streamload: $100 to download 300 Gb/year
- AllMyData.com: $5/month for 100 Gb
- StrongSpace: $225/month for 120 GiB
Looks like we still have a way to go.
5 Comments
What we need is some sort of open source encrypted back up system that works over the internet. Find a friend you trust, each install a backup server (cheap PC with a big HD) and set things to synch the two servers over the internet at midnight each night. Redundant, offsite backups for less than most tape backup systems.
Maybe that already exists?
Unfortunatly there are still speed issues with an internet transfer. Assuming I have 300gb to back up (I just heard thats the 2006 storage average) and assuming that I can some how squeeze all the bandwidth out of my 6mbit connection there’s still quite a bit of transfer time involved with that amount of storage.
Sounds like external firewire 800 might still be the better option
S3 doesn’t work for you?
Amazon’s S3 might actually be a viable solution here.
It’s $15/mn to store 100 Gb - with $20 to upload it, and another $20 to download it.
but what is the interface with s3??