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Online Backup's Inflection Point
I have been a fanatic about backing up my hard disk since the mid 80s after losing a month's work on a year end paper in a hard disk crash. Scars like that don't heal. They stay front and center and result in an obsession about being backed up.
For years it meant a local tape drive, some backup software, and a manual tape rotation system. It was a pain, but it worked.
But then in the mid 90s, my friend Charley Lax introduced me to a company in Boston called Connected and my life changed for the better. I didn't invest in Connected, but Charley did. I became a customer. Charley made money (eventually, it took a long time) but I got peace of mind. Connected was sold Iron Mountain a couple years ago.
Fast forward ten years. I still use Connected. And I have been rewarded several times by being able to get back a file, a folder, and a whole hard disk when I would have otherwise been totally hosed.
I can't say enough good things about Connected. Except that Connected is too expensive for most people at close to $20/month.
Connected is basically an "enterprise" solution meaning it is sold to businesses, large and small, to protect the data that sits on their employees hard drives (most likely mobile/laptop hard drives). It's too expensive to be a consumer solution.
For most of the past 20 years, while I have been paranoid about my hard drive, most people I know have been operating without any sort of backup protection. Doing manual backups just isn't a realistic option for most people.
But things are changing. Everyone is now using digital cameras to shoot pictures and video. That's ending up on their hard disks. They are accumulating a lot of music on their hard drives. These personal media files are valuable to them. And increasingly my friends who have been going unprotected for years are saying to me "what do I do to make sure I don't lose this stuff?".
I tell them about Connected but many say "$20/month is too much, what are my other options?" There are a number of less expensive online backup solutions out there and we have seen a few new companies being started recently that promise even lower prices.
One that I particularly like is Carbonite, started by serial entreprenuer David Friend. Carbonite is aimed squarely at the home computer user and costs $2.50 per month. If you are looking for a good home solution, I think you should give Carbonite a shot.
I am not the only one thinking that online backup is reaching an inflection point. Jeremy Zawodny thinks so too and has an interesting post up on the subject right now. Apparently some of Jeremy's readers think that consumer broadband upload speeds are too low to make online backup a viable solution.
I totally disagree. I have been using online backup for over ten years in my home. I have even used it over dial-up. You just let the backup go over night. The only really large backup happens when you get started. After that, these systems just backup what's new. I have had to run a backup for almost a day a couple times, but I do it over a weekend or something. That's a small price to pay for peace of mind. I agree with Jeremy, it's like filling up a swimming pool at the start of the season. Once it's done, it's over.
So I think online backup is at an inflection point. Consumers are going to be adopting this approach to peach of mind in droves over the next couple years.
It will only take one lost photo of a newborn baby or a birthday party to cause "post crash stress syndrome". Trust me. I know how it feels.
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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Online Backup's Inflection Point:
» Swimming Pools and Hard Disks from Jeremy Zawodny's blog
A few weeks ago when I wrote Cheap On-Line Storage Coming Soon, I suggested that the stars are beginning to align in a way that makes it possible to build companies that offer services like on-line backups. I was surprised at many of the comments left... [Read More]
Tracked on Dec 12, 2005 10:35:23 AM
» Online Backup May Be Ready for the Consumer from Stuart Radcliffe
Fred Wilson has an interesting article on his feeling that the time has come for on-line backup solutions for the consumer. [Read More]
Tracked on Dec 13, 2005 10:03:46 AM
» Mozy Online Backup from life
Data are (and is, now that data as singular has become acceptable in American English) important to me, especially things... [Read More]
Tracked on Dec 31, 2005 12:09:23 PM
» Mozy Online Backup from life
Data are (and is, now that data as singular has become acceptable in American English) important to me, especially things... [Read More]
Tracked on Dec 31, 2005 12:32:12 PM
» Mozy Online Backup from life
Data are (and is, now that data as singular has become acceptable in American English) important to me, especially things... [Read More]
Tracked on Dec 31, 2005 12:44:28 PM
» The Online Storage Gang from TechCrunch
The online storage market is evolving fast. In the past, users could expect no more than a simple service where files could be slowly uploaded and downloaded from a mapped virtual drive or a simple web based interface. Little competition (and the burs... [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 2, 2006 5:08:58 PM
Posted December 12, 2005 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
I'm very interested to see how well AllMyData will work out. I've been waiting for a P2P solution to this for a while - I hope they can build a reliable service. Currently I'm using DataDepositBox and trying out Mozy.
Posted by: Roddy | Dec 12, 2005 10:04:46 AM
I'm very interested to see how well AllMyData will work out. I've been waiting for a P2P solution to this for a while - I hope they can build a reliable service. Currently I'm using DataDepositBox and trying out Mozy.
Posted by: Roddy | Dec 12, 2005 10:08:03 AM
Along similar lines, I've been trying out mp3tunes.com for backing up music. It has the nice feature of providing not only backup, but also allows you to stream your music back. Despite a few startup pains (I have a LOT of music!) the $40/ year price point is worth the peace of mind, and having access to all my music from any net-connected computer is a bonus!
Posted by: An Entrepreneur | Dec 12, 2005 10:13:10 AM
Microsoft's FolderShare is free and is also a next-generation backup service. It doesn't backup per se; it synchronizes files between two or more computers.
I've got two laptops and a desktop. Instead of having to manually synchronize My Documents between the three, Foldershare does it automatically with a <1 min. latency. The benefit here is that it's more than a backup - Foldershare enables you to have live redundant copies of your files. Thus, even though my computers are segregated by project, I can still access and edit live copies of any file on any computer. The only improvements I'd like to see are:
1) ability to sync more than 10,000 files
2) ability to store files on an online server and access them through a remote desktop client (sort of like merging Foldershare and MyWebex and putting it all online)
Posted by: Yali Friedman | Dec 12, 2005 10:38:05 AM
Not exactly for backup, but http://openomy.com/ will offer you 1Gb of free online storage.
At least, it is not specific to MS-Windows. Mac users have .mac and Linux users have ... sftp to a friend ?
Posted by: Bruno | Dec 12, 2005 11:17:13 AM
Anyone looking to backup important pieces of data online and on a completely secure server should go look at a product called SimDesk. SimDesk is an entire office suite offered to public citizens(i.e. states, cities, different ogs, and even some countries) for free. Currently, only a few cities and a state has provided this product to its citizens. One of the great features is their tape backup for every user's account. Of course, when you sign up for an account you get much more than just tape backup, but it will be a good surprise. Go do your own research. If Online backup truly is at an inflection point then this will be a good place for people to get their own peace of mind, and at a great price.
Posted by: Tony | Dec 12, 2005 11:23:13 AM
mac users have .MAC which not only provides online backup, but also synchronizes all your computers so that each computer has a mirror image of your complete database of files...and it can share across users within the organization or beyond, if you so choose.
Rightn now I have 2Gig for $99/year, which includes the online synch, file sharing, web hosting of photo ablums (integrated with iPhoto), and data backup...not a bad deal.
jh
Posted by: james haft | Dec 12, 2005 11:29:38 AM
Great post Fred!
Backup is bloody awesome.
It's just somebody's gotta talk to Ed Sims and make it frictionless.
Posted by: Daniel Nerezov | Dec 12, 2005 11:30:03 AM
Iron Mountain has been making steady strides into the software space recently. They just acquired another firm called LiveVault that has a pretty neat enterprise story as well.
Posted by: Raj Bala | Dec 12, 2005 11:34:46 AM
I agree: we need online backup big time. The only problem is that what I need to back up is around 250GB of data, if I back up *everything*. Just "work" files, maybe 2 GB. Just photos: 15 GB. Music: 125GB. In short, no online backup service will hold me, at present.
My current strategy involves firewire drives and the SuperDuper! software, which is the best I've found for Mac backups, but still inflexible and buggy by my standards.
Here's a business idea I had long ago, but never really did anything with and I'm sure is not out in the wild, but if not, someone should do this. It's a "distributed" backup network using P2P software. In exchange for being on the network and accessing the P2P services (such as file sharing, VOIP, and whatever else runs on it), one must accept numerous encrypted chunks of data and store them on his or her hard drive. These chunks are other peoples' data, that have been thrown out into the cloud for backup purposes... You get to back up as much as you host, and the architecture would be like Google -- the server smarts would know where the online copies of your data were at any given time and, when you request a restore, would batch it down to your PC. The key is to make sure everyone stays connected, so perhaps some sort of credit/point system for downloads or transfer credits in exchange for remaining a stable node.
To the end user, it would show up like a network drive. Backups would be simply to drop files to the drive, much like the Gmail drives work now.
Posted by: scott partee | Dec 12, 2005 12:01:10 PM
ooh! I just read all the links from people, and it appears that my above idea is now a company, although slightly different in scope than the one I imagined:
Posted by: scott partee | Dec 12, 2005 12:10:15 PM
Backup is a huge problem. I use Foldershare, but there's another option which has potential: simple RAID mirroring.
Hard drives are getting so cheap these days that you can buy a second USB or FireWire drive for the cost of only a few months' subscription to a backup service. MacOS comes with built-in RAID software which is pretty sophisticated.
RAID has some significant advantages, not least of which is that if your hard drive fails, you don't have to do anything (at least not right away). Your computer keeps working exactly as though nothing happened. You can even reboot.
The biggest downside to RAID right now is that it's still too geeky for the average user. But it shouldn't be too hard for someone to write a simple piece of software which lets a non-technical user plug in an external drive and create a mirrored drive with a single mouse click.
(By the way, I have actually configured my home computer with a mirrored RAID drive. It works flawlessly, and I can be assured that everything on that drive is safe, short of the house burning down or nuclear catastrophe.)
Posted by: Shivering Timbers | Dec 12, 2005 12:25:01 PM
"Example: You share 10 Gb on your hard drive and get access to 1 Gb on Allmydata."
So yeah, this is a peer system. Not sure how I feel about that. I like the idea of backing up over a secure connection to some secure storage somewhere with multiple levels of failover protection. But that's just me--not a typical consumer.
Posted by: charlie crystle | Dec 12, 2005 1:53:23 PM
I agree it's a little creepy to back up to someone else's computer, but my thought was that the company would keep a full copy, then distribute encrypted chunks out to the network for retrieval to save bandwidth resources (i.e. drive costs down). In the event there are no specific chunks in the net, they'd be retrieved from the central server. And, of course, the chunks are encrypted and one could opt out of putting your data on the net in exchange for premium pricing. I don't know -- seems to me the whole architecture of the future is "grid" and highly distributed... might as well take the leap now. It's especially getting important now that individuals can generate such massive amounts of data... for example, Podcasts should have a P2P net for distribution that's not so difficult -- every receiver is a sender, etc. That would eliminate those huge hosting bills a lot of Podcast get smacked with.
RE: the RAID 1 solution. That's fine and dandy and what I do (although I don't believe in RAID 1, but rather batched snapshots done daily -- safer than mirroring because bad data on one side of a mirror can kill good data on the other), but as you mention, what if your house burns down? Right now, I'd lose all my photos, music and work and I've yet to find insurance that will repay me for my lost time in digitizing 20,000 MP3s from my CD collection ;)
Posted by: scott partee | Dec 12, 2005 3:48:07 PM
just a an observation on this topic, but i see lots of ppl storing their pix on flickr now as back up. this is an intersting topic for a future event for us!
Posted by: irina slutsky | Dec 12, 2005 4:49:41 PM
It is indeed an interesting topic. Re point solutions such as Flickr and mp3tunes vs. more holistic solutiuons that are currently in development or making their way to the market now.
Cringley wrote an interesting article last year that got me thinking about the P2P angle. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040909.html . It seems the masses need to get comfortable with online storage before they will make the step to P2P backup.
Fred is right that 1.0 services are way too expensive. We are nearing the inflection point as costs are being driven down by fifth wave computing factors thus allowing a consumer friendly price point at the same time that the early majority are beginning to digitize their lives. Once you spend a lot of time doing this you realize you only want to do it once. This will drive demand.
Personally I want all my stuff in one place with Flickr/mp3tunes ease built on top. I have not seen that in the market yet.
Posted by: Lance Weatherby | Dec 12, 2005 6:25:30 PM
I'm definately on the Flickr for photos backup now. I don't even bother storing them on my hard drive anymore. I go straight from the flashcard to Flickr uploader over the web. No middleman.
Posted by: Charlie | Dec 12, 2005 11:44:18 PM
I agree that today's internet access speeds are good enough for reasonable remote backup services. I'd missed Carbonite, thanks for that pointer.
see also my riff on Zawodney's Pool: http://blog.eronj.com/2005/12/07/zawodnys-pool/
Posted by: ron k jeffries | Dec 13, 2005 12:11:25 AM
We are about to launch a hosted service solution known as Omnidrive. It tightly integrates in with the host platform meaning that the users don't actively have to use it (synch in the background) and will be avaliable for windows, mac, pocket pc and web editions.
Also yesterday on my blog I wrote about the Economic s of Online Storage and why online storage providers can not be compared to the amount of storage others such as Gmail offer.
Posted by: Nik Cubrilovic | Dec 13, 2005 2:01:08 AM
Very interesting... Thanks
Posted by: Great_Reader | Dec 13, 2005 4:23:16 AM
Good and timely post, Fred. Even though the idea isn't new (remember the free 1999-era X-Drive?), I agree that these services are finally coming of age. I've been playing around with free online backup service called Mozy. They give 1 gb free storage and 2 gb if you answer a demographic survey.
I installed Mozy in November but had to quickly uninstall it after I began getting random blue screens. That turned out to be a conflict with Symantec Antivirus that was fixed a few weeks ago. Since reinstalling, it's been flawless.
What's nice is that after the initial (long) backup, the incremental backups can happen silently while your PC is idle. I haven't had to restore any files yet, but it's definitely worth a try (especially given the price.
Personally, I wouldn't use any one online backup to the exclusion of the old-fashioned kind, at least on occasion.
Companies with ad-based revenue models come and go, so there's something reassuring about DVDs or tapes in one's own safe deposit box.)
Posted by: David Gilford | Dec 13, 2005 8:57:04 AM
david and all,
I'd recommend you test a restore before you rely on any service for your backup. Take it from me, a dude with over 10 years in the IT trenches, having a backup and having a working backup are 2 different things.
And further, I went and read the article on the "economics of storage" wherein the author explains why point solutions can't compete with distributed solutions, in essence and explains that the primary cost is bandwidth, not storage. This further strengthens my case for a P2P solution, which I belive is, at present, the only way (short of being Google and having 100,000 servers already deployed)to achieve the kind of distribution and defray enough bandwidth to provide storage services in any meaningful quantity (i.e., a lot more than a gig or two, and for a lot less than $20/month). I'm thinking that you could probably get people 100GB for about $50/year -- but that's just a hunch and, of course, wildly dependent on the number of users in the network. Google could probably jump into that market, add P2P into their online storage mix and get people 500GB for $50/year.
Posted by: scott partee | Dec 13, 2005 11:31:00 AM
I too lost a good bit of data a while back, and since then, I have ritually put things in folders, and watched their size. As they grew new 700mb, i would burn them to a disk, and then move them to an 'archived' folder. Since the introduction of DVD R's, I moved all my info from CD's to DVD's, and reduced the size of my backups immensely.
I dont have anything of GREAT value, just music and photos (which to me are the greatest value).
Great Blog.
Jason
Posted by: Jason Carlock | Dec 13, 2005 1:40:44 PM
I had a hard drive crash couple of years back and lost all my financial records, email, tax records and schools papers and few sites i was working on for school. i was almost in tears with that. Of course I never bothered to take backups then. well i learned my lesson from it. have been backing up to my spare drive for couple of years. now recently i have been playing with a online backup service. Its called backup2net . I use the software to back up my main drive to my spare hard drive every day. The scheduler does taht in the middle of the night. once a week the software backups my main folders to the online server. i was using their free package for some time. But the free space is only 1000 MB. Now I get 1GB and its enough for my main files , i wouldn't want to loose if my kid throw coffee in my hard drives:) No idea how i survived without the online backup so far.
Posted by: thomas J | Dec 15, 2005 3:17:52 PM
I agree that $20 for Connected is too high for most home users. I was a long time and happy Connected customer until their prices went up and storage limits went down.
I tried Backup to Neighbor for a while which is another interesting P2P solution. But I gave up because I started to lose confidence in my backups.
Now I'm doing a home-grown P2P solution with VPN and Second Copy that I'm very happy with.
I wrote about Online Backup for the Home today on my Blog, which describes these experiences.
Posted by: Alex Chapman | Jan 8, 2006 9:26:33 PM
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