According to MSNBC, up to 50 million Megaupload users could lose their data by Thursday. They haven't been able to access their data since surprise US government raids early this month. None of these users has been charged with any crime. This continues the US trend towards expanded use of forfeiture laws to arbitrarily seize and/or destroy private property without due process. The US Constitution's 5th Amendment states "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty or property without due process or law; nor shall private property be taken... without just compensation." The situation raises questions both about the reliability of cloud services for data storage and the end of due process in the United States.
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Member since:2005-06-29
You're really reaching for this argument. Two terabytes of online storage is prohibitively expensive especially compared to the price of a decent external 2TB drive. Even with the recent price hike for spinning drives, you can still net a good 2TB unit for under $100 if you know where to look. Compare that to several hundred dollars per month for equivalent online storage.
Then there's the speed issue. You mentioned a lack of patience for onsite backups. I'm sorry but I'd much rather spend a few hours babysitting a large transfer over 400Mbps or faster USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt than up to a week of 10Mbps upload speeds from Comcast. Even if you're lucky enough to have a 100Mbps upload, once again you are paying far too much for it and you can't be sure that the cloud storage you are paying hundreds for can sustain that on their side.
Bottom line: Do five minutes of research before making ludicrous claims about what "most people" can do.
Member since:2007-01-13
At no stage did I say that online storage is cheap or fast. I merely stated that doing a backup these days is a huge PITA compared with the past - 25 years ago it took me less than five minutes and used one floppy disk.
However there is absolutely no reason why routine online backups of large data sets won't be viable in a few years. Australia is installing FTTH to about 95% of households over the next decade and storage by then will probably only cost $1-2/TB. In terms of convenience file lockers beat lugging around hard drives.
I think you need to spend a few days away from IT Land if you think that a) most people have a 2TB external Firewire hard drive lying around and b) know how to do a backup.
Edited 2012-01-31 11:21 UTC
Member since:2005-12-02
People would not be able to backup that much data to the cloud anyway. Not only is the time required well beyond what anyone would wait for, which would take weeks, but also the monthly bandwidth alotments by some ISP's. For example, Comcast customers are limited to a total of 250GB per month transfer, or lose internet access for a minimum of 6 months. That limitation alone says the cloud is not the place to store a backup of your machine, let alone the privacy issues involved.
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OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
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Member since:
2007-01-13
Unfortunately modern backups involve far more than just copying some text files to a floppy. Most people don't have spare 2TB exterrnal hard drive and enough patience to do a proper backup.