Whirlpool

And why not? I would pay money to back up the contents of my computer with Adam online, I know I should do it myself, but in these heady days of high definition cameras and high capacity hard drives and can take a lot of time to back up every single thing, not to mention you need to rebuy all your hard drives AGAIN just so you have the same capacity to backup with.

But it surely doesn't cost Adam anything (or much, at least) to have something sent straight from your computer to them, and then back to you again if the worst should come to it (such as a house fire, or Windows behaving like Windows).

So would you use a backup service if Adam had one? Would you pay for it? If so, how much would you pay for it?

Danny writes...

And why not?

Not that I want to shoot you down Danny, but I'm just writing a counter argument. I'm sure the bandwidth associated with it would be suitable, given it doesnt need to go through an upstream carrier, but Adam would have the invest big time in some for of storage system for all their customers.

I think they have ~70,000 customers, lets assume everyone has 250gb hdd they want to back up, Adam would need 17,500,000gb of storage! Now I for one know that's not going to come cheap!

The other point would be, of what content people are going to be backing up. I'm sure Adam don't want to face legal ramifications for storing 17,500,000gb of warez!

Danny writes...

So would you use a backup service if Adam had one?
Nope. Too much time. Too slow a connection to back up the amount of data I have. It'd take all week.

Would you pay for it?
I'd rather pay the $150 for an external hard drive and back stuff up to that. Actually, to be honest, i'm planning on purchasing network hard drives and storing them in the roof with all my other network gear. I think it'll be easier =]

Danny writes...

but in these heady days of high definition cameras and high capacity hard drives and can take a lot of time to back up every single thing

Wouldn't it take the same amount of time, if not longer, to upload it to Adam?

not to mention you need to rebuy all your hard drives AGAIN just so you have the same capacity to backup with

If you take away your OS, programs, games etc., your storage files will end up being less than your current total data. With hard drives so cheap these days, and getting cheaper, it doesn't take much to back up to one and store it off-site if you're worried about house fires etc.

Mr.T writes...

I'm sure Adam don't want to face legal ramifications for storing 17,500,000gb of warez!

I don't think that matters. Like getting a safety deposit box, the po po don't come around every so often and look through all your things. Personal data, right to privacy and all that stuff still matters these days.

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Feature/83086,online-backup-services.aspx

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,23745550-5014239,00.html

http://www.google.com.au/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=online+backup+service&meta=&btnG=Google+Search

Carbonite looks pretty good for only $50US a year for unlimited storage.

I'd use it if it wasn't metered, but I have SFA files that are critical and couldn't be sourced again. I just compress those files and email them to my Gmail account.

MookieB writes...

I'd use it if it wasn't metered,

That's the biggest idea behind my idea. I know there are backup services already, but for almost all users these days a single backup would have them shaped, and for people with lots of 10 megapixel photos or whatever it could take an entire year to backup, having to wait to be unshaped for for a month until you can continue the backup again. I don't know how those other data storage people can afford to back up stuff for people, like you say it is like 150 dollars for an external 320 GB hard drive, and say if every customer needed 600 GB backed up that would cost Adam 300 dollars per customer or 21 million dollars for all Adam customers. Not to mention finding some place to store 140,000 external hard drives :S Then paying someone to run back and forth to plug and unplug them depending on when they are needed, it would cost 25 million dollars a year to run an operation like that. Now imagine a large US company that has to be ready to serve 700,000 customers (or 0.2 percent of the population), that is a quarter of a billion dollars a year!

Unless of course an IT business has something better than external hard drives to backup stuff to, in which case who knows how much it would cost.

Danny writes...

would cost Adam 300 dollars per customer or 21 million dollars for all Adam customers. Not to mention finding some place to store 140,000 external hard drives :S Then paying someone to run back and forth to plug and unplug them depending on when they are needed, it would cost 25 million dollars a year to run an operation like that.

Yet that is what you are suggesting Adam consider doing??!?

I think the single biggest constraint with this wouldn't be the storage space at Adam (I don't feel that the uptake would be so high as to actually use that much as most people don't care that much or have their own backup systems in place already) but rather the upload speed of the individual users connections.
Consider that you (ideally) don't want a backup to take more than 1 hour per day, or perhaps 3 hours per week to complete, depending on the volume to be stored.
Now consider that the theoretical maximum upload speed is 1Mbps or (approximately) 110KBps.
At that speed, under the time constraint of one hour per day, assuming maximum continuous throughput, you could backup a sum total of 386MB each day.
If you operated with rolling backups so you backed up a total of 1GB over the course of a week, comprised of 50MB of "essential" backups every night and a different set of "non-essentials" rotating between them every few days, you're really not all that much better off than if you were to buy (for example) 5 1GB USB thumb drives at a whopping total outlay of $8 each ($40 all up) you can back up more data in less time every single day, if one thumb drive fails, you fail back over onto the second one and replace the dead unit. Heck; go for 7 and back up onto a different one every day of the week, store them all around the house and keep the latest one on your person at all times. That way, for you to actually lose your data, your whole house would have to be burned down and you mugged on the same day.

I don't think you could ever feasibly backup enough stuff over that link to make it the logical choice over portable storage media for the home user.