31–40 of 46 posts
I tried mozy and a few others, but I always struggled with rather slow upload speed, and ultimately found the much easier way is to buy USB harddisk, which I hide in my workplace and just bring it home once per month to make backups. (I store online only a few files I am actually working on, using Dropbox).
I had about 50GB of backed up data with mozy for that last 3 years, growing from ~20GB when i started. I've been paying $5 per month for almost 3 years now, which means I have paid ~50 a year (very rough to take out transaction fees and bandwidth fees, etc). That should buy them at least 320GB of average sata disk drives per year (assuming all money going into storage). This means for "unlimited" they can recoup 6x t…
I'd stick with mozy, but 50GB is too small. I have about 89GB in Mozy right now and if I could get that for the $5 per month, I wouldn't go anywhere. Mozy is pretty slow, so backing up even more data isn't very practical. Also, their system doesn't handle large files very well. My 89GB is just pictures, personal movies, documents, and source code.
Just venting I guess, but beware if you are trusting your data to Mozy...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that's true for Dropbox, at least. Consider that Dropbox gives you 50gb for the basic plan. I'm guessing most people don't back up videos, games or their OS using that space, but rather back up their documents, projects they're working on in whatever field, photos, and music. Of those, only with music is there a chance to use deduplication, and that's assuming you can figure out two music files with different…
You need a decent hash of every file anyway (to check for changes etc) so it's pretty trivial to deduplicate. I don't think you'd need to do stuff like check the ID-tag.
It would be interesting for Dropbox to release numbers on how many music files are identical between different people.
This left me wondering; wouldn't use of deduplication storage backend (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti ) lessen the incremental cost of servicing each new customer? Couldn't it be well expected that, encrypted data aside, files with same content are often used by more than one persona?
> Greatly reduce backup & sync time through comprehensive compression and advanced de-duplication (saving you time)
> You are only charged for the compressed de-duplicated data amount (saving you money)
Still it is not clear if they do cross-user deduplication, but I think it is very unlikely because all the content is encrypted with an user-specific key, which I think they don't have access to.
This left me wondering; wouldn't use of deduplication storage backend (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti ) lessen the incremental cost of servicing each new customer? Couldn't it be well expected that, encrypted data aside, files with same content are often used by more than one persona?
They are already doing some deduplication. From https://spideroak.com/whyspideroak : > Greatly reduce backup & sync time through comprehensive compression and advanced de-duplication (saving you time) > You are only charged for the compressed de-duplicated data amount (saving you money) Still it is not clear if they do cross-user deduplication, but I think it is very unlikely because all the content is encrypted with…
I didn't read the article but wanted to comment on spideroak: Really love their "realistic" pricing model, even cheaper with a .edu email address. Had a lot of problems with CPU usage, may have been the thousands of files in my .git directories... This leads me to support, they have been overwhelmed and it has been difficult getting then to review my logs. they gave me multiple months free due to my non usage but I d…
Also, it's slow to update things. You wouldn't expect this, given that Linux has inotify, but it is.
Their support is rather bad, I've emailed them about legitimate bugs and high CPU usage and SpiderOak not syncing and a whole lot of things, but they never credited me anything. I decided to buy it for a year to back my photos up because my disk is making weird noises and it took them three days to reply to my "PayPal won't let me pay from my balance and I don't want to add a credit card" email, to tell me to add a credit card.
I replied "yes, I don't want to add a credit card", and they haven't replied since I sent it three days ago. With that sales support, I wonder how they sell any copies.
Pardon the somewhat OT question, but do any of these services offer standard protocol support so that any OS can store data? I know DropBox supports Linux, and some services support OS X, but I haven't seen anything generic enough for my FreeBSD workstation, though the concept of cloud storage sounds great. Give me NFS or SMB access if you must, but I'd love to get in on this cheap consumer cloud storage thing withou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Explicit pricing is better for moderate users and worse for heavy users. "Unlimited" effectively subsidizes heavy users by overcharging moderate users. As a heavy user, I'm a fan of "unlimited".
It depends. When "Unlimited" service is sold with a Terms of Service that includes an "Excessive Use Policy" like Mozy's [1], the heavy user is operating in an ambiguous zone where continued use of the service at the advertised price is at the whim of the provider. We've seen this with unlimited data plans with the cable ISPs; they're not really unlimited. To me, it's similar to having a traditional credit card versu…
That suggests an interesting business model where: we sell everyone on 'Unlimited', then we wait to see who is the most egregious customer, and drop off the ones on the top of the pyramid (and keep the revenue positive customers).
Reminds me of how the cellular operators used to be towards roaming: sure, you can roam, just don't do it so much that we cancel your contract.
Pardon the somewhat OT question, but do any of these services offer standard protocol support so that any OS can store data? I know DropBox supports Linux, and some services support OS X, but I haven't seen anything generic enough for my FreeBSD workstation, though the concept of cloud storage sounds great. Give me NFS or SMB access if you must, but I'd love to get in on this cheap consumer cloud storage thing withou…
I had about 50GB of backed up data with mozy for that last 3 years, growing from ~20GB when i started. I've been paying $5 per month for almost 3 years now, which means I have paid ~50 a year (very rough to take out transaction fees and bandwidth fees, etc). That should buy them at least 320GB of average sata disk drives per year (assuming all money going into storage). This means for "unlimited" they can recoup 6x t…