Felipe Alfaro Solana

I’ve been thinking for a while how to properly keep back-ups of all of my data while, at the same time, saving a few bucks. Since the “cloud computing” term is now floating all over the Internet, I thought that a distributed, remote back-up service might do the work for me.

I looked around and found quite different services, but most of them offer ridiculously small storage size, like 5GB, or force me into using sub-par Web-based user interfaces that make using rsync complicated or unfeasible. I’m looking services that offer 2TB+ storage and, so far, the only solution that I find promising is Amazon S3. The problem is price. Keeping 2,048GB of data stored in Amazon S3 costs me about $300 USD per month, plus a one-time cost for uploading the data. At that price, for a whole year, I can buy a QNAP TS-809 filled with 8 x 1.5TB disks

So, unfortunately for me, multi-terabyte back-up copies to the Internet are still to expensive. Perhaps, in 5 years, technology will drive prices down such as that I can afford to keep my back-ups on the Internet.