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.