Written by W. Curtis Preston
Tuesday, 01 March 2011 00:42
Gmail's outage today made me think about something I've had in the back of my brain for a while. While I'm a big fan of the cloud (as long as it makes sense for you), one of the things we say is that you can outsource the management of your data, but not the responsibility for it. I've also written that for personal data, I do not believe in using a free (or incredibly cheap) cloud service provider to store your only copy of data. For example, I don't believe that the only copy of your pictures should be on Flickr.
But now there's a way to have two copies of data in the cloud: cloud backups for cloud storage. Backupify.com and backupmyblog.com/backupmypics.com/backupmytweets.com/backupmymail.com will back up various parts of your online life for a reasonable fee.
Backupify.com has a free plan that will back up 2 GB of online data from Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and more. The Pro account includes support for Google Apps and handles up to 20 GB of online data from 25 online accounts for $4.99/month. Finally, they have the Pro 500 account that handles an unlimited number of accounts with an unlimited amount of storage for $19.95/mth.
Backupmyblog.com/backupmypics.com/backupmytweets.com/backupmymymail.com has a free 1 GB account and a basic account that cost $19.95/year for up to 1 GB of online data. Additional storage is $2.95/GB/yr. It is unclear if someone who wanted to back up all of those things would need four accounts or one account.
I have not used either of these (yet), but I'm surely thinking about it.
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go to www.syscloudsoft.com to download free software
I don't think that's a very fair comparison. A relatively small startup with some growing pains compared to a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate?
It's also like picking on a website when they crash due to the slashdot effect.
http://blog.backupify.com/2011/03/08/update-a-backupify-system-upgrade-is-underway/
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/backupify-capitalizes-on-gmail-outage-then-blows-up/45839?tag=mantle_skin;content
Backupify went down the other day. LOL
Are they backed up to the cloud (I think you use Mozy) or just on your Drobo?
What I _think_ you're asking is what about data that I _only_ have on these locations? I think that's a pretty good topic for a future blog post. Here's a quick summary:
1. Under most circumstances, you are trusting their ability to store and replicate your data.
2. Most of them do NOT have versioning capabilities, so you need to provide that.
3. If you use a gateway appliance that does snapshots AND stores a local copy, then you have both history AND two copies, one of which is not on them.
4. Some are also talking about allowing you to mirror data between two different service providers.
Cloud svcs like Amazon S3, Nirvanix, RackSpace are not backups. Who/how do you backup your Cloud svcs?
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229219581&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News
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