Online Backups

In my posts on backup strategy, several comments asked if I’d looked into online backup services. Such services don’t work for me, because the internet connectivity I buy is metered and costs me about $.005/megabyte transferred. Getting a different internet access provider isn’t currently an option because I live in a remote spot and this provider is pretty much the only way to get fast network access (although that might change in the near future).

But there are other issues with such online backup services beyond the costs of transferring the data. The best wrapup I’ve seen is this article by James Duncan Davidson, which goes into the whole business in depth. Don’t just read the article, some of the comments are insightful as well.

Bottom line: for most of us who don’t have access to huge bandwidth and who need to store large amounts of data, online backup services are probably not going to be the answer.