I am a reasonably prolific digital photographer. I run a small business. I download (and keep) a reasonable amount of video. I have a large digital music collection. I’m sure many people could say the same, or at least two or three of those things. So, why am I saying this? All of these things generate data.
Whilst my business doesn’t generate an enormous amount of data, it is significant in size and frequently changes and grows. My music collection grows more slowly, but is substantial in size. My photo collection is growing apace and when I download new video, it dwarfs all of the above.
So it is that I have a growing array of portable hard drives hanging off my Mac and one off my wi-fi router as a ‘server’. Let’s look at some numbers.
My business data is about 4.6Gb in size currently. Already a little more than will fit on a single DVD. My music collection is a bit dispersed at the moment as I have yet to complete a reorganisation and re-encoding of my entire collection, but the lion’s share that I have done is 20Gb in size – and that’s the iPod/iPhone-ready compressed files. I also have the full quality backups which are about 6 times the size. My photos currently consume 92Gb of space. This grows quite fast in the summer months and especially with air shows. My recent trip to Auckland added 12Gb in one go! My video collection is, well, very large. I have no idea how large. To be fair, a lot of it is DVD content from my DVD collection, converted for playback on computers, iPhones and PS3s, but there is also a significant collection of downloaded material for which there is no physical media to fall back on. I’m sure even the downloaded stuff alone would be in the 100′s of Gb.
Lately I have been thinking harder and harder about backup. I have a single external hard drive dedicated to backing up the system drive on my Mac. I’ve recently re-organised my photos to take them off my system drive (which was running out of free space) onto an external drive and, consequently, have arranged a backup process to copy them to my server drive as well. Most of my video gets backed up onto DVD-Rs. My business data lives on the server drive and gets backed up to my system drive (and then from there to my main backup drive).
All of this is reasonably good practice and protects me from hard drive failures. But ALL of this data, or rather all copies of all of this data, reside within the walls of my house. Should the house go up in smoke, so does all the data. Though I have visions of ripping certain hard drives from their cables as I rush out of the house!
As I listen to numerous podcasts based in the United States, it has not escaped my attention that online backup services exist. These deal easily with the problem of offsite backup by removing the need for any form of physical media. There are numerous services available and many at quite reasonable costs. But then you do the numbers and it all falls apart.
Let’s consider just my photos. As mentioned above, a recent trip to Auckland netted me 12Gb of new photos. I shoot in RAW on a 10 megapixel camera, so each image is around 10Mb in size. First of all, I’ll take a look at a service I have recently come across in several places. It seems to be an established trusted provider. Mozy.
A free account nets me 2Gb of storage. Well, clearly that’s not enough to store even my moderately sized business data, but hey, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right? USD$4.95 for unlimited backup. That’s per month of course, but I think that’s a very sharp price. Excellent!
Now let’s look at my above-the-New-Zealand-average broadband plan. First, speed. I have Orcon‘s max/max speed which is capable of around 98Kb/s upload speed. To be fair, it usually achieves a good fraction of that, although sometimes there seems to be a bottleneck. Let’s say the average speed is around 88Kb/s – a number I see quite often on my speed meter. Let’s consider my 12Gb of photos from Auckland. 40 hours! Ouch!! But that’s not typical I suppose. More likely, I’ll add about half a Gb a time, so that’s only 1 hour and 40 minutes. Still a reasonably long time! But what about getting my existing 92Gb up there? Nearly TWO WEEKS of 24×7 upload!!
But that, believe it or not, is not the killer to this plan. Two weeks is actually not going to be the answer to how long, because my total data cap is 50Gb per month. Given that the four computers and PS3 in this house typically consume half of that, that’s a remaining 25Gb per month if I don’t download large amounts of video as well. So, in fact, the answer is 4 months to back up my photos.
What about if I lower my sights and just look to backup the business data – a measly 4.6Gb. 15 hours to backup and unlikely to blow my data cap. This, I might just do. But look at Mozy’s blurb for their “home user” 2Gb free backup account:
Get 2 GB of 100% free online backup for your photos, music, and other files. No credit cards, no monthly payments or fees, and no expiration.
Aside from the fact that probably most people will end up with way more than 2Gb of “photos music and other files”, they clearly market the service as a media (as in video, images, music) backup service.
That works in the USA where there are (currently) no data caps and, in many places, high speed connections. Here in New Zealand, I’m on the current standard ADSL connection (pretty much my only option) which gives me a theoretical upload speed limit of 768Kbit/s. My connection gives me most of that. The new “high speed” ADSL2+ network coming from Orcon soon (in Wellington) might theoretically triple download speed, but upload only goes up to 1Mbit/s, which his hardly a leap.
So in summary, no online backup service, no matter how cheap, is going to get much traction in New Zealand because of our slow, capped connection plans. There’s no obvious sign of them improving much in the near future either as the ‘next generation’ weighs in with little more to offer. Even our lone cable provider – who only serve a tiny fraction of the country – last year introduced their new “warp speed” service which largely equals ADSL2+ in performance, though usefully delivers 2Mbit/s upload speed. With a “massive” 120Gb cap, however, it doesn’t come cheap at NZD$230 a month! That’s nearly triple what I pay now.
So I’m off to look at cheap, portable storage devices now.
I’m currently looking for online storage within NZ and to be honest the prices out there are horrendous. I’ve opted to test a site overseas instead called Idrive with $5US for 150GB… estimate for upload of 1GB was a whopping 7.8 hours!! I’m also on Max/Max with Orcon and that was at 300kps upload speed. Luckily I don’t have anywhere near the 92GB’s that you do but still.
I also don’t know yet if I upload the data. Next time will it upload that same data again from scratch or will this just upload any data that has changed from x date… hmm.
It’s a race going no where. I can’t bring myself to pay $200 for 200MB datastorage within NZ (lock-it.co.nz) and I can’t stand waiting that large amount of time to backup my data.
Will let you know how I get on as I’m just installed it at the moment.
I’m about to move to an office away from the home for the first time in 15 years and am wanting to backup online – preferably just new daily data. Friend also recommended idrive. How did you get on with the question of new data only backed up and speed?
Online backup does work for a large number of people, however your data requirements exceed what its capable of.
For the small/home office who normally backs up to a USB key (notoriously unreliable) online backup is an easy solution, esp if all they want is accounting data (generally only a couple of megs). For your 90+GB I would look at an external HDD.
@Janine, Lock it is generally quite expensive as they offer insurance on the data. Other NZ providers charge about $1 per GB.
Thanks for your article, I was interested in your opinion and certainly understand the challenges you have faced. The article is a little dated now, so the scene has changed somewhat, but some of the problems do still exist to varying degrees.
Just to ensure that I have disclosed my biases, I am the general manager of Nexus Data Security, an online backup provider.
One general comment I would make is that I think you threw the baby out with the bathwater. Because it was impractical for you to backup 100GB, you gave up on online backup completely. For business data, certainly Mozy would not be a solution that is designed for the business needs of New Zealand. You also only looked at their free service. I’m sure that your business charges for its services – and with good reason. Free is free for a reason.
New Zealand businesses would “seed load” their data – meaning that the initial copy would be saved to a portable disk and then loaded directly on the backup server, so it does not need to be uploaded via the internet. That would deal with your bandwidth problem – all subsequent backups are incremental. Most NZ online backup companies offer this. Some of our customers have several hundred GB of data backed up with us this way. Restoring data can be done in the same fashion.
I would also suggest that you focus on what data you “cannot afford to lose”. Would the loss of photos cripple your business? If not, then stick with the hard-drive for them. But if the business data is important, then use a professional service to back it up offsite. The Mozy Home User account (or any free / home-user account) is not suitable.
If you’re looking to protect your “essential” data, it might cost a few dollars. It would also pay to consider the legal implications of backing up overseas. The data has no protection under NZ law. The IRD recently commented (negatively) on the practice of storing data overseas. (http://www.istart.co.nz/index/HM20/PC0/PVC197/EX245/AR214162)
Finally, having lived through one house fire and two earthquakes, I have some personal experience with unforseen circumstances. In none of the above scenarios did I reach for a hard-drive, wallet, passport… or anything that I considered to be “critical”. Self preservation seems to supercede any thoughts of business continuity. Basically, you need to have that stuff sorted before that unexpected day comes along.
Thanks for your comments, Peter. All reasoned discussion is welcomed.
I don’t believe the article has dated that much. Orcon still have not delivered anything more than ADSL in Wellington, even two years later. My data cap has risen slightly to 55GB, but my speed remains the same.
The idea of seeding a backup is a good idea and many decent providers offer this service for a modest fee. That’s well and good to seed my photo backups, however as I stated in the post I can add 12GB or more of photos at a time and my connection simply won’t handle that. I’m not aware of a “supplementary seeding” service.
Earlier this year I discovered CrashPlan (http://crashplan.com) whom I *have* paid in order to store my business data online. Storing the data offshore is perhaps a consideration but our business relies on overseas web hosting and most of our customers are overseas. Only ourselves and the money end up here – though our financial records are on paper (it’s very much a cottage business). If the business data disappeared tomorrow we’d still have products to sell and although we might have difficulty re-issuing existing products (as we do from time to time), new products could still be produced.
My photos, on the other hand, are one-off creations that can never be recreated. I spend a lot of time trying to capture moments that will never happen again. I just lost a hard drive about 2 weeks ago. My primary in-house backup may not have been fully up to date (though I think it was) but I had also just had CrashPlan back it up for offsite storage so I am doubly covered. I haven’t got around to a restore of those as they are managed by software I no longer actively use and restoring them would only mean I had no excuses left not to migrate them to the new software.
Other items lost were downloaded video (replaceable and I have some format conversions on another drive) and some of my music collection (backed up on DVD or re-importable from the original CDs).
Since the death of my drive I have bought a hard drive dock and a 1TB bare hard drive which I spent the weekend moving backups to and adding additional backups. This means I have a nice, small unit I can carry to work (I did this today) and leave in a drawer. I will soon add another identical drive with another generation of the same backups and these will be swapped out probably weekly. The total effort to update one of these drives is to plug it in and leave it for an hour or so. I’m quite pleased with the outcome afforded by CrashPlan and a cheap, swappable drive system.
For me, online backup is still not viable to protect ALL my important data not because of price but because of slow and capped broadband connections. I don’t expect that to have any chance of changing until UFB comes to fruition but goodness knows how much we’ll be paying for that.