el­studio

Economics of Online Backup

Photographer James Duncan Davidson takes a look at The Economics of Online Backup – and finds that time and cost work against online storage for his terabyte of data.

Worth a read. The comments mention some of the solutions we’ve tried here at el Studio – Mozy and JungleDisk/S3 – and also some that we haven’t, like CrashPlan.

With any online backup plan, the crucial issue may not be how many GB of stuff you’ve got overall, but rather how frequently that data changes.

Perhaps it’s fine if it takes a week to upload your stuff to, say, Mozy. But if, like Davidson, you find yourself producing 3 days worth of uploads every afternoon – then online backup probably isn’t the best choice.