Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
Seems to me the major risk is the possibility that Pogoplug is over-reaching, that their costs don't support the business model. You load up all your data, they go bust, you and Megaupload users buy each other beers to cry over.
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Anyone who uses them shouldn't do so as their only backup. It's always worth burning some disks or writing to external HDDs in addition to off-site. Aside from anything, if you need quick access to your backup, it's not really worth waiting for it to download again when you can copying it over from a local backup. Should the cloud go bust you've also still got a backup. The cloud should really only be there for the times your house burns down or floods/theft removes access to your local backups.
An alternative though is CrashPlan to an external USB hdd located at another family members home and you reciprocate for them. Free and limited only by the size of disk you provide and available bandwidth if either of you are on capped plans.
BTW in terms of storage cost, Amazon (who after checking the pogo site it sounds like they're using for archiving) charges 1 cent per GB stored on their service per month. In addition once you retrieve more than 5% of your average data stored, you're charged per GB downloaded.
There were numerous discussions at the time about how the final figure is calculated which could result in it getting quite costly. Whether Amazon have clarified that since, i'm not sure, but even at the cheapest level, it seems they're hoping the average user will store under 500GB in the archive and/or not retrieve often. Otherwise that $5/m is going straight to amazon.
For most that may not be a bad bet, it just boils down to how much they think the average user will backup and will that cover the cost of the occasional high usage user.
They may be doing data de-duplication for all the users who are storing their backups un-ecrypted which could cut storage too. But any user doing that is imo taking a risk with their data.