I often preach about data backups and suggest tools, strategies. Usually, I do not touch on the wisdom of having off-site copies for home offices, due to speed and cost. My own solution has been to have “fire safe” file drawers, and duplicates of my external drives. You might have handy friends/relatives willing to stash such copies for you in their homes, or a bank safe deposit box that can hold the present generation of compact disk drives and memory cards. You could even box a drive and hide it in the trunk or under a seat of your car. I can now recommend another approach, which used to be reserved for businesses… and it is much more convenient.
A few years ago, I saw PC remote backup services available over phone modems, and I just laughed. Cable and DSL improve the situation considerably. Fiber networks would help several orders of magnitude more.
During my years at IBM R&D, I saw use of Ironmountain, Inc. for archived paper and tape records. Take a used up mine, provide good drainage and air conditioning, add vault doors and massive shelving networks, purchase a few battery operated fork lift trucks, and advertise for business. Fortune 500 companies were probably the first to afford it. Individuals could not.
A web search shows that remote data storage is now offered to both businesses and individuals. However, some of the vendors do not post their prices, which means they must still be high for small and non business use. Examples: http://www.ironmountain.com, http://www.symantec.com/, http://www.3x.com/, http://www.evault.com (owned by Seagate, the maker of disk drives).
http://www.intronis.com/pricing.html offers home plans of $9.95 per month for 1 GB and $19.95 per month for 4 GB, still pricey. My backup drives are 500 Gb, and I have several pairs.
Two companies appear to be much more user friendly: http://www.datadepositbox.com/ simply states “$2 per GB per month”. http://carbonite.com/ says “Carbonite is only $49.95/year per computer no matter how much you need to back up. No hidden fees. No limits on backup storage capacity.” [Which implies home users. I doubt such a deal for large businesses.]
All these services seem to offer some flavor of continuous backup over cable. To deal with the heavy load of transmitting large files, they can be run on automated schedules, or be made to transmit only during computer idle times. The last two services clearly integrate with current versions of 32 bit MS Windows. Security is assured by encryption.
A feature that can matter to some, datadepositbox.com mentions that users can share passwords with friends in order to share files. That probably requires a license for each computer.
For business backups, “de-duplication” software can be extremely valuable. IronMountain has patented programs for compression and de-duplication, said to reduce storage needs by up to 85%. Other companies offer similar enhancements; IBM recently bought out Diligent for their enterprise virtual tape library (VTL) data deduplication technology.
Home users can select which PC folders to backup. I have previously recommended the free compression utility 7-Zip.org, which can certainly help for remote backups. I recently compressed 370 HTML page files of 3.48Mb into a *.7z file of 358Kb, about 90 percent reduction.
Conclusion
Remote backups can now be both technically and economically practical for small or home (SOHO) offices located in North America. The lowest prices I have so far found are by http://www.datadepositbox.com/ and http://carbonite.com/. The latter says $49.95/year per computer no matter how much you need to back up.
Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.
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