Data backup service
November 25, 2008 – 6:32 pm
We soft-launched our new data backup service today. That means that it is up and available, but we are not telling too many folks about it. (There is some concern that there will be lots of questions from customers to our support team, etc, so we’re going to start quietly and make sure things go smoothly.)
But, you read my blog, so you get to find out now.
Our goal is to add value to the Internet access products that we provide today, so we are offering free backup to all customers, with a modest limit on the amount of data we’ll store. Currently, this limit is 500 megs totally free – enough for some important documents and a lot of photos.
To give an example, while keeping in mind that photo size varies based upon how many megapixels your camera has, perhaps 150k-200k is a good average for jpeg photo size. Based upon that assumption, the free storage is enough for a few thousand photos. That’s great for someone who makes moderate use of a digital camera.
Of course, you can upgrade from free to paid service, and get up to 50 gigabytes of remote backup for just $4.95 per month.
When you imagine how you would feel if you lost all of the personal data and documents, photos, music etc on your personal PC, I think this is a great value!
You can add multiple PCs, so maybe your primary PC requires full backup, but the other systems around the house might fit into the free allowance. You can mix and match, and currently, there isn’t a limit on how many PCs you can back up as a Sonic.net customer.
Most of us neglect regular backups of the digital data that has become so much more important than it used to be. When photos were on paper, as long as your house didn’t burn down, they would last a lifetime. Now, every now and then a hard drive fails or we accidentally delete something, or a PC or laptop is stolen. Even CD-ROM or DVD backups are not immune to failure, and they must be taken off-site regularly to really provide real protection. That is not convenient, and the blank disks are expensive.
Remote backup over your broadband connection is a great solution to all of these challenges. Your important photos and documents are automatically encrypted on your PC then copied in the encrypted form to our data center for safe storage.
At the very least, everyone should use the basic free service – then, if you’ve got more than 500 megs of photos and other data, it’s probably worth the $4.95 per month to keep all that data safe and secure, so an upgrade makes sense if/when you reach that amount of usage.
It’s easy to set up, and software is available for both Windows and Mac users. Click here to get started now!
9 Responses to “Data backup service”
I’ve been using Mozy, but I feel comforted to have the data backed up nearby. Do we, by chance, get faster upload speeds for the data backup to sonic.net? Probably not, but I thought I ask…
By Sun on Dec 2, 2008
Sun,
Performance for both backup and restore may be a bit better – and you can configure the rate that you’d like data backed up at using our tools.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Dec 2, 2008
I was very excited about this service until I see that the backup software supports only MacOS X 10.5
My two Macs still run 10.3 and 10.4. Please consider supporting older versions!
By TK on Dec 8, 2008
It’s an appealing idea. I would rather keep backups on Sonic that on one of the external services – but since I’m Linux-only, currently unusable.
Ah well, 8GB USB keys are cheap and marginally faster to backup to than over the net.
By Jon on Dec 11, 2008
So I thought I’d give this a try – seems like a pretty good deal. I downloaded the application, and WOW! (and not in a good way).
The application, once installed, consumes over 100meg of disk space. Kind of porky, for what it needs to do. But that’s not the half of it. While running, there are several processes that start up, consuming over 375meg of RAM! And exiting the program does not kill all the processes.
At least the uninstall was complete. As much as I hate to pass on a local backup solution, I feel the application code needs to be less bloated.
By Dave on Jan 7, 2009
There is a bit of disk space used – mine’s using about 200 megs, with the java portion eating up the most. Applications these days are big, and it being a Java app doesn’t help with that portion.
That said, I’m not seeing anywhere near the memory utilization you are. Java’s big, but the whole thing is only using about 40 megs.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Jan 7, 2009
It would be very helpful if you could add the ability to save more than one copy of the files being backed up. For example, saving the last 2 or 3 copies would increase the reliability of back ups, because file owners sometimes modify or corrupt their files without knowing they did so.
By Forrest Warthman on Feb 23, 2009