Unlimited cloud storage - $5/month?

[FatDog]

I have not taken the plunge for Dropbox or other cloud storage. I was thinking of "Carbonmite" for off-site PC backup.

Then - I saw this:

http://www.latimes.com/business/tech...,4036781.story


Not sure what the catch to this is. Perhaps they throttle up/download speeds?

Anybody more familiar with cloud storage want to look at this and tell me if it looks good?

[Quexos]

My personal data in the hands of private corporations out there for the monitoring, data sharing (with third parties) and possible deletion for only 5 bucks a month ? What am I waiting for, where do I subscribe ...

[shenye]

Too good to be true. "Unlimited storage" for a flat rate is never going to work. It's not feasible. Someone will have to pay for the bandwidth and storage used, no matter how much "proprietary technology" you claim to employ.

Did you check if they have a "fair use" policy? Usually it's there to restrict the unlimited claim.

[JoeD]

They're probably using something like Amazons archive service, where the long term storage costs are dead dead cheap. The cost comes when you want to restore more than a certain percentage of data in a given time period. If they are using that, perhaps they've weighed up how often most of their customers will want to restore more than a small % of data at once?

However, by the sounds of it they offer no encryption beyond the in-transit ssl. Crashplan may be a better off-site alternative for backup imo, albeit a little more expensive for individual users (unless you backup to a friend). Built in encryption, set it up and forget about it operation.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by shenye

Too good to be true. "Unlimited storage" for a flat rate is never going to work. It's not feasible. Someone will have to pay for the bandwidth and storage used, no matter how much "proprietary technology" you claim to employ.

Did you check if they have a "fair use" policy? Usually it's there to restrict the unlimited claim.

I could see it working. For a company like pogoplug, it wouldn't be that hard to figure out how much storage most people are going to use month-to-month. If most people use a few gigs, then they can easily subsidize the heavy users.

[gurion]

Isn't Carbonite offering unlimited storage (albeit for 1 PC) for $5/mo?

[shenye]

Originally Posted by gurion

Isn't Carbonite offering unlimited storage (albeit for 1 PC) for $5/mo?

There are quite a few offering "unlimited" storage I believe. Here is some interesting tidbit:

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled on 1 August 2012 that Carbonite had misled consumers by describing its online backup as unlimited. Following a complaint, the ASA investigated and found that due to bandwidth restrictions for uploading data, which limit upload to 2 Mbps for the first 200 GB but then to only 100 Kbps once 200 GB had been exceeded, the backup was not unlimited. Therefore the advert was "likely to mislead consumers".

Additionally, Cabonite breached rule 1.7 of the CAP code for failing to respond to the ASA's charges.

Wikipedia

ASA ruling

[whitearrow]

Originally Posted by gurion

Isn't Carbonite offering unlimited storage (albeit for 1 PC) for $5/mo?

They do. And if you get a new computer or your old one breaks down, you can transfer the account to the new computer.

[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.

[JoeD]

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.

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.