- Monday, 9 November 2009
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All men are born truthful and die liars - Marquis de Vauvenargues
Terabyte home impacting online storage industry
UK CONSUMERS' voracious appetite for digital media has apparently led to the phenomenon of "the terabyte home" and the resulting quest to back up all that data is having a massive impact on the online storage industry, says a new survey.
UK-based market research outfit, Red Shift, carried out the survey on 1,050 UK consumers in August 2008 at the behest of Hitachi Data Systems.
According to the survey results, digitised Britons now have the capacity to store approximately 1,000 gigabytes of digital media ranging from photo albums and music to videos and emails.
The survey notes 51 per cent of those polled said they stored digital files on five or more types of devices including digital cameras, computers, video recorders and USB sticks. Results also indicate that the majority of people also use more than one of each device, leading to some 30 per cent fessing up to having their digital wares spread across at least 20 individual devices.
But with their digital bits and bobs scattered throughout their ‘terabyte homes', consumers are purportedly finding it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to keep up, especially when it comes to finding and securing specific digital files. This has apparently driven many into the arms of online storage services.
It seems people are finally realising the importance of data backup and security, with Red Shift discovering 64 per cent of those polled regularly backed up data, with a full fifth (21 per cent) using online storage services to do so. An impressive 69 per cent of respondents said they backed up their digi-data at least every month.
Interestingly, for those people who chose to back things up online, 64 per cent most trusted Internet providers whilst a resounding 36 per cent put their trust in online storage services offered by banks. For instance, US-based Wells Fargo & Company offers an online storage service allowing users to store digital files and documents on the bank's enterprise infrastructure, and it's proving wildly popular.
Alec Bruce, a Global Storage Consultant at Hitachi Data Systems noted that "As these millions of households shift their terabytes of data from their home to online storage, we're going to see an unprecedented explosion of digital data which will send shockwaves through the online storage industry."
He added recent high-profile data losses by online storage providers made trust an issue for consumers and emphasised providers needed to make sure the storage platforms underpinning their services were robust enough to meet rising expectations and exponential growth.
Bruce reckoned the next obvious step would be the introduction of policy-based storage in which a person's most valuable data was backed up most frequently. He added people might also benefit from better search and retrieval tools, to easily locate individual files. µ
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I mean, I was well aware of them for some time. Using them just didn't make any sense to me. A year of using a service could buy me a new hard drive that would, well, hopefully last more than a year.
Yes, yes, they offer a never failing backup and all that piece of mind stuff. I just want a place for my pr0n.
In addition to backups on traditional media, and tapes are still the most reliabe ones, I suggest to utilise solutions such as RAID-5. And check your devices for errors! A RAID system may manage to handle a single bad disk, but don't wait to see what happens when the next disk fails.
I also suggest to ENCRYPT all disks, not just important documents. Truecrypt looks like a useful solution. Make no exception, encrypt all data. Besides that this simplifies the handling, it also makes it far more difficult to find sensitive information, assuming a useful cryptographic solution is being use properly.
And instead of high-capacity 9cm disks, pick a few more 7cm ("notebook") disks with less capacity. Noise drops dramatically. The heat load goes donw, too. Less heat from small disks extends the life time of your data. And a good hardware RAID controller easily compensates for the smaller disks' lower transfer rate.
NEVER HAND OVER YOUR DATA TO AN ONLINE BACKUP PROVIDER. NEVER!
If I tried to upload the around Terabyte of data I would like to back up. Compost.. Comcast would have an entire herd of cattle. I am not against having an off premise storage place for my personal files, but cost is prohibitive for anything that seems halfway reliable. With the money saved, I also would buy a couple TB of hard drive storage and most likely save up and get a decent RAID 5 capable solution. I saw something on Tom's about a fire resistant and water...um...resistant enclosure with drive. It may not do RAID, but will serve as an extra redundant backup.
Ya, uhh.....
Now where can I get a 10gbit Internet 2 connection to transfer all that data in less than a month for under $100?
I've been using Carbonite for a while now and it works great. It took about a week to upload 45 GB but to do that I just left my machine on 24/7 and most of the backup was done at night while I slept.
Knowing that my data, particularly important papers, photos and home videos, are safe no matter what happens to my home or office is worth the small price I pay for this service.
Members here that don't see the necessity of on line backup services have not yet experienced the irrevocable loss of important files.
Is it getting cloudy in here? The Home Cloud industry will employ all IT Britons and a quarter of India's by the end of the week!
Or, that's a lot of porn to censor.
Let me tell you from personal experience trying to find the right solution for myself. I was practically swimming in a sea of providers when I began looking. If it wasn't such a big industry you wouldn't see that many competitors. Just take a look at my review of all the a href="http://tomuse.com/ultimate-review-list-of-best-free-online-storage-and-backup-application-services" online storage /a providers I found. I had to create a comparison chart just to sort and filter them all!