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Comments on news posted 2009-01-22 10:09:00: Comcast insiders have informed Broadband Reports that the cable giant will soon be launching an online backup and storage service called Comcast Secure Backup and Share, for which customers can pay a monthly or yearly fee. ..
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 massysett
join:2006-01-04
Silver Spring, MD
| NAS Sure you could buy NAS, but NAS is not offsite. What if your house burns down? The NAS is gone too.
Maybe a flash drive is a better solution (though speed would be a concern). You can carry flash with you. But NAS isn't much help for offsite backup. | |
| pabster
join:2001-12-09
Waterloo, IA
 ·Mediacom
| Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. Don't underestimate the importance of offsite, online backup just because ComCast does something stupid. (I don't disagree with their pricing so much, just the whole cap thing.) Everyone brags about Mozy and how they only pay $5 a month but have you ever had to RESTORE that data? Mozy is slower than crap and sends your files in about 200 different ZIP archives you have to weed through. It's a friggin' mess. And their home service is capped (rate-limited) to 1Mbps. Very painful if you are dealing with large volumes of data.
But I digress. You absolutely should have offsite, online backup (at least of your most critical data.) You just never know when disaster will strike, whether it is a hard disk failure or something more catastrophic (earthquake, fire, flood, etc) and then your NAS or that cheap USB drive you have sitting on your desk will do you no good. | |
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jmn1207
Premium
join:2000-07-19
Reston, VA
 ·Verizon FIOS
| Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. If the data is that critical, why the hell would anyone be relying on a residential cable company to provide their internet service and backup storage solutions?
The people using Comcast are probably concerned about photos, media, and a smattering of important documents. You could save this type of data to any of several local storage solutions and keep it in a safe deposit box for much less money. No matter where the redundancy resides, it can always be compromised under the most catastrophic of situations; however, most people are simply worried about a critical hardware failure of their computer components, and especially a hard drive crash or some damaging security violation. | |
| | | pabster
join:2001-12-09
Waterloo, IA
·Mediacom
| Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. Yeah, well, I don't know about you...but the gigs and gigs of family photos I have are worth a few bucks a month to keep safely off-site alone. That's not counting important documents and other things. And last time I checked a safe-deposit box costs too. And can I access its contents and pull things back from anywhere, anytime? There's a legitimate market for online backup which is why the business is exploding and even the monopolies are looking to cash in. | |
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jmn1207
Premium
join:2000-07-19
Reston, VA
·Verizon FIOS
1 edit | Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. Sounds like you need a photo sharing site, not online backup. I mean, if you have that many photos, you could not possibly have enough time to look at them all, so you may as well let your friends and family have access to these all of the time. Something like Shutterfly or Flickr might be a better option. | |
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Count Zero
MD2Be
Premium
join:2007-01-18
Warner Robins, GA
 ·AT&T DSL Service
·Cox HSI
| Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. But a lot of those sites don't let you push the full-quality versions of your photos to them. My Aperture library is something like 60GB... I doubt flicker would let me store all my cool photos from my trips around the country in their full 8-10MP glory (and RAW format) on their site. | |
| | | | | | pabster
join:2001-12-09
Waterloo, IA
·Mediacom
| Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. I do utilize on-line photo sharing as well, but I like to keep a backup of the actual files elsewhere also. Can never be too safe.
As for RAW storage, I don't use RAW myself, but SmugMug will allow you to do that (albeit not free, but neither is Google or Flickr if you actually want more than a gig or two of storage and some perks.) | |
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Count Zero
MD2Be
Premium
join:2007-01-18
Warner Robins, GA | Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. Exactly - so for the price Mozy isn't bad. | |
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jmn1207
Premium
join:2000-07-19
Reston, VA
·Verizon FIOS
| said by Count Zero  :But a lot of those sites don't let you push the full-quality versions of your photos to them. My Aperture library is something like 60GB... I doubt flicker would let me store all my cool photos from my trips around the country in their full 8-10MP glory (and RAW format) on their site. Flickr does all that, and for half the price of Mozy. Personally, I don't trust a 3rd party online site to store any of my data. But for photos and videos, there are much better alternatives than using just about any online backup site.
»www.flickr.com/upgrade/ | |
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Count Zero
MD2Be
Premium
join:2007-01-18
Warner Robins, GA
·AT&T DSL Service
·Cox HSI
| Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. That works for photos, but how about my 50GB of home movies (graduations, Christmases, Thanksgivings, new puppies, etc)? Or my hundreds of stored documents? Or my music collection?
Having a 1TB hard drive sitting around with an up-to-date backup of your data sounds good but remember they can fail at any time. I remember when my 60GB external USB drive died without any warning. I used to do daily backups of my old laptop onto it and one day it just wouldn't mount to any computer I plugged it into. Oops. At least it was just a backup of data and I was able to go buy a new USB drive the next day and not lose anything. | |
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jmn1207
Premium
join:2000-07-19
Reston, VA
·Verizon FIOS
| Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. I certainly don't have the time to do daily backups, but I still prefer a local option over an online backup. I would definitely put those home movies on something other than an external hard drive, and I would definitely not expect to keep these things at Mozy, for goodness sakes!
An external hard drive is my first option, since it is simple and effective. The chances of it crashing when you need it for a backup would be relatively rare. Sure they break sometimes, but they are cheap and you can simply backup your data on a new one. However, I would much rather have a physical copy, such as a good quality DVD or CD. And I would make more copies every few years.
Until something more robust comes along, which inevitably always happens, this is the typical consumer's most promising medium to store their important data. | |
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Count Zero
MD2Be
Premium
join:2007-01-18
Warner Robins, GA
·AT&T DSL Service
·Cox HSI
| Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. I go with a two-pronged approach. I use Time Machine to keep an hourly backup of everything on my computer on an external 1TB SATA drive and then I have everything backed up on Mozy too. So if my apartment did burn down, or my computer were stolen or something else awful happened and I couldn't use Time Machine to recover my data I'd be able to get my data from Mozy, and if I deleted a file accidently I can just pull it back using Time Machine. | |
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jmn1207
Premium
join:2000-07-19
Reston, VA
·Verizon FIOS
| Re: Offsite, Online Backup IS Important. It's just not for me.
Just about every local backup option can be automated as well, so that's not really a feature that separates it from other options. Online backup benefits from the remote location, inexpensive storage space due to their bulk purchases, and the ability to access this data from just about anywhere. I don't need that. I would think that relatively few people really do, they just think they do. Whatever helps them sleep better at night.
I throw my photos on CD's, and keep my music and video on a thumb drive. I've got like maybe 4 gigs at best to deal with. Less than 5 minutes to drag and drop it all. I have a few emails with activation keys for various software that I have purchased, and my bookmarks. That's about it.
About every 3 years or so I upgrade my computer. At that time I do make a bit more of an exhaustive backup to make the transition smoother. But were talking about stuff like making a list of the utilities that I frequently use. I'll grab the latest versions from the web and save these to an external USB hard drive prior to the new computer build. I'll also make a preemptive strike and find the most recent drivers for all of the hardware before the installation. Not critical, but it saves some time.
Now, if I had tons of data that was dear to me, or highly important for some other reason, and I lived in an area susceptible to hurricanes or summer brush fires; I would certainly look into a more robust backup option. | |
| 
aybaybay
@comcast.net | They need to increase the cap I hate the cap, I think I'm already over 250 GB! | |
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DeeplyShrouded
@comcast.net
| All you have to do is look at the weather. If your area hasn't had an earthquake in the last 100 years
or more, chances are you won't have one tomorrow.
With flashdrives so cheap now, what comcast is offering is
a joke. Look at how many infected computers we have on the
net now with botnets and the like. You're not actually going
to sit there and tell me that the datacenter comcast wants
to use is 100% immune from such things?
What happens if your data is lost? Oops! Sorry! My bad?
How crackerproof is it? Personally, a portable storage
device backed up regularly and kept in a location of my
choosing is a lot more secure to me than trusting some site
telling me my data is secure. That's like the cops saying
they're out there to protect us, yet people are killed every
day. Bottom line, the only person I 100% trust is myself.
--Deeply Shrouded & Quiet
--Central Control! D-Dial #49 | |
| | inferno
join:2008-07-06 | Just bought 2 years of carbonite unlimited service for $45.. Just bought 2 different accounts for 2 years of carbonite for $45...
Comcast is a complete ripoff... :-| | |
| olegy
join:2003-06-02
San Diego, CA | what about natural disasters I had a lot of my own backups. They are all gone in fire.
Only online files survived....
Gmail is about 7 gigs for free and you can create as as many accounts as you want. Plus - some third party apps like Gmail drive will really help. | |
| 
jeffhambone
Peace, through superior firepower
join:2002-02-02
Manassas, VA
·Comcast
| Another head-scratcher... I don't get it. Resources are allocated to operate and maintain a service that perhaps 10-20% of the customer base will use, when basic customer service and network management still need attention: »A Kinder, Gentler Comcast .
I figure this offering will last less than a year, then be dropped like the newsgroup service, for the same reasons.
--
Son, there's only one thing you need to know: HEMI | |
| 
SolarPup
IT Geek-Dawg
Premium
join:2002-03-07
The Pound
clubs: | Maybe.. Just Maybe.. ...The time this is launched is about the same time they give us access to the bandwidth monitor!
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...I don't have a 8mb speedy connection, I fly through the net at low altitudes! | |
|
jack78
@comcast.net | Isn't even flash media cheaper than Comcast backup Backup important stuff to flash media, put them in a safedeposit box. Every year or so transfer flash media onto a dvd+r/blu-ray disk. safe deposit boxes are about $50 / year | |
| SuperWISP
join:2007-04-17
Laramie, WY | It would be fair to exempt this service from the cap It would be fair to exempt this service from the cap, because it does not go over the public Internet and so does not use Internet backbone bandwidth -- which is the scarce and expensive resource that the cap is meant to conserve. | |
| vosibiz
join:2009-03-09
| HP just closed its online backup service Uline A lot of folks thought storage is cheap and free... well, when it comes to business, storage is actually very expensive. You need the performance, reliability, redundancy, backup plan, data center facility, band width, security infrastructure and a network operations team to manage the system.
That is why it is so interesting to note that many of the service providers are already gone, e.g. XDrive, MediaMax / Streamload, OmniDrive, and recently, HP's Uline, Yahoo's briefcase, etc; With today's business environment, it is expected 80% of online storage or online backup companies cannot survive because they never had a profit model other than offering cheaper or even free service!
A company in such a crowded market space must be able to really compete, but not just by offering cheaper / free service. VOSI.biz is a different company, we focus on product quality and service quality, we are keen to develop better products, more features than any of our competitors. We target premium users and business users who are more willing to pay for our services. We create value and save money for our customers.
Please visit us at: »www.vosi.biz/. We offer a lot more than Online Storage. Our services include Remote File Server, FTP Server, Email Server, Automatic Online Backup and Email Address Book backup services. | |
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