F-Secure have today announced a plan to work with ISPs to offer secure and unlimited online backup.
The service will not be offered by F-Secure themselves but via participating ISPs - F-Secure is just providing the technology which ISPs have to implement in their own back-end.
“Online backup is important. Consumers are realizing that they are accumulating a large amount of irreplaceable digital assets, like photos or personal projects, and that an easy method for protecting this content is needed. F-Secure Online Backup fits this need very well, and has provided an interesting business opportunity for us,” said Marco Frattini, Consumer Marketing Manager from WIND-Infostrada in Italy.
I can see the benefits of a service like for a WHS box. Could you imagine all your truly important data (pictures, documents) backed up twice? Once on your WHS and once online. WHS could automatically backup those documents during the night. Let’s just hope ISP’s won’t charge the bandwidth traffic (they shouldn’t since it’s all on their internal network). Given KeepVault’s recent withdrawal of their unlimited storage plan, it certainly looks as if it’s difficult to make money offering this kind of service.
I myself wouldn’t paying an extra $10 - $20 for unlimited online backup. What about you?
More Information: F-Secure
October 9th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I already have this backup configuration using JungleDisk’s WHS addin - it works very well for minimal monthly cost (I’ve got about 5GB of photos incrementally backed up every night and the Amazon storage fees were just $1.63 last month).
The weakness with F-Secure’s plan is going to be the ISP I think - would you trust your ISP not to delete your backup the next time it accidentally deletes all your email? I’m not sure I would…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/17/fasthost_email_deletion/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/23/plusnet_deletes_again/
October 9th, 2008 at 11:12 am
sounds good, but it’s probably just a way for ISPs to screw more money out of their customers.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Unlimited is a pretty strong word. I currently have 3.5TB of data and am having a hard time imagining an ISP allowing it to be backed up to their cloud for a flat fee.
October 9th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
My ISP already offers webspace but charges £5 (around $10) per month for only 100MB, I doubt they will be charging less or an equal amount for storage. I also doubt any other ISPs will charge a “reasonable” amount either.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
My ISP is Verizon. Not a chance I want them to soak me for more $$.
October 10th, 2008 at 7:44 am
THere is no such thing as a free lunch my friends. I think cloud storage and backup will commodotise as it is starting to do now with even the mighty AOL announcing plans to exit its XDrive backup solution.
Myself, I use a combination of Jungle Disk and SMEStorage.com. SMEStorage.com allows me to use my Amazon S3 files on their platform (using their OpenS3 beta) and I get access from iPhone etc **but** I can also backup all my S3 files to a Google email account and treat the Google email account as a storage cloud using their platform, so I have two copies of my data in the cloud. I do this weekly. What does this cost ? The 40 cents I get billed from Amazon per month !