Sad news today from online backup service, Jungle Disk, who released a blog post today stating that their beta product for Windows Home Server was “an experiment” to understand the wants and needs of the Home Server/Home NAS backup market.
They continue: “One of the most important things we’ve learned over the last year is that the Windows Home Server platform alone isn’t really large enough to justify a stand-alone product, but there is a large amount of interest in online backup from users with other brands of home NAS devices from Linksys, Netgear, Qnap, Drobo, and others.”
At a time when the other main WHS online backup service, KeepVault have dramatically increased their price plans, there appears to be a big question mark over the viability of the online backup business model – one looking to grow value, the other fragmenting and going after volume. The question in my mind is how much backup does the average user need – if I have a home server backing up my PCs, am I willing to pay for backing up that backup? In my case…. no.
So, Windows Home Server owner – have you paid for an online backup service for your home server? If not, why not?
In the meantime, we’ll be pulling Jungle Disk from our add-in list and forums. Bye guys, and good luck.
Update: Comment from Jungle Disk below states they will continue to support WHS, but also focus on other NAS platforms.
October 7th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I completely understand why Jungle Disc chose to remove the WHS support. Many WHS users have a lot of data (pictures, movies, mp3s, etc). Using Jungle Disc to back all of that up would be very expensive.
Currently I am using Keep Vault. I have about 400-500GB of data online. All of this data is centrally stored on the WHS, so other than duplication, there is only one copy. The online back up was a last resort solution to the “total disaster” scenario (robbery, flood, fire, etc where the WHS box is destroyed). For this it has provided the safety net that I wanted, even though I never had to restore a single file. When my contract is up for this year, I will be revising my needs, and may consider a lower plan (with some data not being backed up).
Although PP1 provides the ability to do backups of the data, those are only as good as the person performing it (if they perform it), and numerous examples exist of people who restored to old back ups, or couldn’t resore due to failed back ups, or started strong, and got lazy and didn’t perform the back up. That’s why an online solution (weather to the cloud or another computer) is a great idea.
It seems that everything is aligning for someone (maynbe MS) to produce another Add-In. Microsoft currently has a “technology preview” of Windows Live Mesh, which includes Folder Synching. Now if someone takes that and applies it to the WHS we would fill the need. I would buy a relative or friend a WHS box, if I could remotely administer it (already provided in WHS) and be able to back up my WHS to their WHS (new add-in potential). There would have to be bandwidth limits on upload and download so that the synching doesn’t fill the tube, but this seems like a possibility, utilizing the Live Mesh and the Folder Synching.
Hopefully, someone will provide this add in.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I am seriously evaluating alternatives for off-site storage. I have come to believe that it is impractical for large amounts of storage, given the speed of connections (and I have a very good one), the terms of ISPs and the costs for the host service.
What is “large”? I think I see the break-point somewhere in the 5-10GB range. I suspect that I will move my photos to a pair of hard disks that alternate between home and a safe-deposit box every 2-3 months along with a rather complete “snapshot” of the WHS and all it’s content - including backups. If I add a large amount of content I can always swap the disks earlier than planned.
Critical data (financial, etc.) will likely go on-line somewhere daily, onto flash drives weekly and, of course, into the aforementioned safe deposit box every 2-3 months.
WHY? I have the SD Box already, so no cost. I have unused hard drives. I have the flash (USB) memory sticks. How much do I really need to have immediately available on-line? After all, if the PCs and WHS are stolen or destroyed it will take time to replace the units — plenty of time to go to the bank. It becomes a cost-tradeoff.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I’m currently using JD for offsite storage of my photos. The Amazon S3 costs is not much for my needs. @MB: I don’t get what the cost would be for JD? They charge for the SW and Amazon handles the storage and related fees.
If the online backup market is not reliable it would be great with a community addin that would support encrypted P2P backup. Something like http://www.databarracks.com/buddybackup/ for WHS. I could reserve 1Gb on my WHS for a few other persons to use as off site backup if I in return could get space at other home servers. If I wanted duplication I would simply offer 1Gb space on my WHS and then have 3×330mb space on 3 WHS out there. That way I should be safe if one of the hosting WHS was down, lost a drive etc.
I’ve never tried buddybackup, I wonder if it would work on WHS.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Perhaps we should have been more clear in the blog post - but we aren’t withdrawing support for WHS or the current product. Instead, we’re planning that the next release will encompass MORE home server / NAS products, beyond just WHS.
It’s true that the WHS market is not yet large enough to support “dedicated” products, but we still plan on supporting it along with other platforms moving forward.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
As a WHS developer myself, I can completely relate to this. I myself have found the WHS market to be quite a disappointment (i.e. it’s not at all what I was expecting). So much so, that I’ve opted to no longer develop solutions for it as well. It’s too bad really as I absolutely love the idea behind the WHS and would really like to see it grab a bigger market share.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
People I’ve talked to about online storage have only good things to say about Jungle Disk, and I was happy promoting it’s use on Windows Home Server.
I hope they don’t axe their support for WHS.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Bit of chicken and egg, I guess, Mike - platforms need apps to bring users in although I do think Microsoft’s marketing support for WHS needs much greater investment. We’re certainly still in an early adopter curve right now and all the research indicates we’re a few years away from WHS (or indeed any home server platform) becoming mainstream…..
October 7th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
@The Office Maven
I am not here to argue that being a WHS add-in developer at this day and age is going to make anyone wealthy but I do think that overall the WHS community has been exceptional and Microsoft has some very talented and dedicated people on the case; Granted things could always be better, and my personal rant is that I feel Microsoft isn’t doing enough in terms of marketing and reaching its demographics but since we are all learning right what to do with such a platform at home and how to do it – in time we will figure it out and I agree with what Terry said, “couple of years” and some sort of home server will surely be “mainstream”.
I like to think you will continue developing your current add-in and future add-ins, it’s not going to be easy and will take countless hours and one may wonder if it’s really appreciated or if one will ever be compensated but rest assured one of the many great things about WGS and the community is that one can always come here and scream “I can’t take it anymore $##$# dammit that’s it” and someone will either motivate you or slap you silly.
There I hope that helps
October 8th, 2008 at 1:55 am
For me, online backup solutions are simply too expensive. With HD prices getting cheaper, it is far too easy to write a simple batch file and use Windows Task Scheduler to do the same thing for a whole lot less money.
Buy (2) 1.5Tb drives, put them outside the data pool, have your batch file copy over whatever data you want to backup on whatever schedule you desire, daily, weekly, etc.
Swap out HD’s on that schedule, 1 HD in your WHS and 1 HD off-site. If the data is that important, you WILL remember to do that simple task of exchanging drives. And be able to pay off those drives quite quickly when one looks at the cost layout for that much capacity.
Of course, if this too inconvenient, simply pay the cost of the online service and have them put your money in their pocket.
October 8th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Just a quick comment, as a new user of whs i have been realy impressed with it and have dedicated a lot of time over the last couple of weeks in finding out as much about its full funcionality as possible.
And i’m looking forward to seeing how whs2 turns out.
It’s seems a shame that when at a time more people are becoming aware of whs that addon or third party supporters in general are backing away from it.
I realy hope that Microsoft ease there restrictions a lot more on the next release to allow more of a community input into the overall experience from being able to fully customise whs home page to having a lot more addons to choose from.
And would like to take this oppurtunity to thank sites like this one and others in giving newcomers like myself a place to start
keep up the good work guys us newcomers do appreciate it
Nigel
October 8th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I’ve been using JD for a while to back up about 27Gb of photos. With the amount of churn I have on my files, the cost has been something under $5 a month which seems OK for my piece of mind.
I’ve also done a WHS data backup, which I store offsite, but I’m not conscientious enough to do this regularly (photos of my new child tend to come in pretty thick and fast)!
I’m glad JD will continue to provide support as I’m basically too lazy to investigate other options and set up new systems!
October 8th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I appreciate the additional information from Jungle Dave. Think I’ll check out JD…
October 8th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
I’m glad JD will still be developed for WHS. We use it for offsite storage of our digital photos. I’ll definitely be purchasing the release version of it when it’s released.
October 9th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Glad to year Jungledisk isn’t exiting the market altogether.
I use JD as a secondary offsite backup of the ‘essential’ home videos, pics, etc, that would be disasterous to use. JD has been very good so far (and the Amazon.com backbone is significantly, significantly more reliable than Keepvault when I tried them for about 60-90 days around the beginning of 2008, BTW).
I’m a JD user for life, most likely.