So Jeremy Zawodny poses an interesting take on online backup, with a great analogy which he hopes might be true. The comments seem to say otherwise, with knowing advice. Fred Wilson recommends two services, including one he depends on personally. His readers, too, have potentially useful comments on the situation.
The problem? None of the four or five solutions I just reviewed via these posts are for Mac OS X. Yes, I know about .Mac, but there are notable problems with that solution, starting with terrible online documentation. Even in the PDF (PDF?!?!!), I couldn’t find any explicit details about Backup 3 that would tell me how many gigabytes are available, nor any discussion about bandwidth limits, if any. I believe there is a single digit gigabyte limit on many/all of these services. I understand that, but part of the appeal of backup is… not thinking about it. I don’t want to have to consider which files to backup. I would hope that .Mac is remarkably simple, matching the brand promise and the target audience, but would it kill them to provide actual services details on the website in easy-to-understand HTML? Until that problem is rectified, I won’t even consider the more important issue of space limitations.
Maybe I’m in the minority. I am willing to pay a reasonable amount for a solution, since I know I’m living on borrowed time here.
Thoughts? Of course, I don’t have comments or trackbacks enabled, so hard for anyone to share the ideas/services I’m missing, but let me know via email at jbr at this domain.
Sujal reminds me about SuperDuper, which I had previously noted. Compelling review here. Still not an online solution, which means I have to (a) buy and (b) rely on an external drive… but the app is less than $30, and storage costs continue to drop. I’ll take this step over the holidays. And keep hoping for that perfect backup in the cloud solution.