Underwhelmed by the offerings of online file backup storage
I spent a portion of this weekend evaluating online backup solutions. I am trying to create a comprehensive backup plan for myself and figured off-site online storage should be a part of this plan. I tried 5 or 6 different solutions and ended up frustrated and unimpressed.
First and foremost, online backup solutions need to think like Lightning McQueen: “Speed. I am Speed.” I don’t want to wait a day for my backup to be completed. One service took 5hrs to get a 200mb zip file at 35%. I realize the file is large, but I have several files this size and larger. Transferring over HTTP is laborious at best. Some services stated upload speeds would be equal to the speed of my broadband connection. Not so. I am now determined to find a service that offers FTP upload as this offers the speediest of all upload/download capabilities. This may cost a little more, but the speed will be worth it.
Second, I want simple off-site storage. Most of the current so called Web 2.0 services offered a more complex service with video and file sharing. It made me wonder what business they were in. Are they in the online backup business or the file sharing business? To me those are two different things. As a potential online backup customer I don’t care about sharing my music and photo files. I just want to back them up.
Third, several had desktop clients which claimed to increase the upload speed. Nada. Plus, I bit the bullet and even downloaded and installed .NET to test out one of the clients. I have put off installing .NET. Sort of peeves me that I have to install another platform on my PC for software that doesn’t show very good performance. The desktop client I eventually installed was slow. Clicking through the folder structure took several seconds to open each level. Painful. The issue could have been with my PC, but again, it needs to work for me and this clearly didn’t. I don’t understand companies having to rewrite a simple Windows Explorer interface in the latest bloated computer language.
There are several others I have yet to evaluate and will post a review of those that are worth your time. Time is precious even when backing up your files.
[tags]backup, storage, files [/tags]
Posted by Paul Flyer on Monday, November 13th, 2006 in Utilities
Pat Says:
May 11th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Solution to this problem should be a method of transfer so that it operates independently and automatically using proxy tools designed to work in background format without monitoring.