Online Backup Knowledge Base

Cloud-based Storage as a Commodity
Do What I Say or Be Prepared to be Phased
By Rob Cosgrove, CEO Remote Backup Systems, Inc.

I’m warning you in advance that I’m going to whine like a little girly, toss a fit, call you names, and blame you for a lot of stuff. So if you don’t want to hear this from a grown man who should know better, link away now.

I’m in the Online Backup business; Not as a provider of online backup services, but as a vendor of software and services for companies who, themselves, provide Online Backup services to end users. So I get to hear what kinds of lame excuses end users give them for not buying their services, and I have to try to figure out what to do about it.

The problem is (and now I’m speaking directly to YOU, Mr. and Ms. End User) You guys who think cheap backup services are the best thing since sliced bread are misinformed. And here are ten good reasons why…

• You think $5 a month for backing up an unlimited amount of data is too expensive. Or worse, you think $5 a month is a bargain!
• You will actually trust irreplaceable data to a $5/month service!
• Millions of you trust irreplaceable data to FREE services!
• You complain when it takes weeks to back up a terabyte.
• You think all online storage space is created equal.
• You wouldn’t know RAID, RTO, RPO, FRP, or geographically distant mirrors if they bit you.
• Your Continuity Plan is…. Wait a minute… What’s a Continuity plan?
• “Charging $5/month for unlimited backups is a sound business model.”
• You don’t care that a half dozen cheap and free online backup services have gone out of business in the past 12 months.
• “The cheaper the better! FREE is the best. ‘You get what you pay for’ doesn’t apply to Online Backup.”

Guys, PLEASE wake up. These companies can’t afford to keep giving it away for free forever, and $5/month isn’t enough to stay in business, either. Back in the roaring 90’s we proved that giving stuff away for free while burning through millions in venture capital to build “market share” wasn’t a great business model. So now it suddenly is? NOT!

In the past twelve months we’ve seen a number of high-profile online backup companies with the same stupid business model go out of business, offering their users mere days of warning – not enough time to restore what might have been your only copy of the Director’s Cut of Stargate, you nerd.

You are so trusting. Look at you with those big unquestioning eyes, happily uploading your stuff to that company with the cute name, so sure that you’ve found the best way to back up your stuff – “And it’s CHEAP, TOO!” You are just adorable!

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was an online backup company that was founded by a cool dude who used to hang out with musicians and invent synthesizers. He had a sense of humor and was somewhat of a nerd, so he named his company after something he saw in Star Wars.

(He didn’t buy his software from me, but I forgive him for that mistake.)

This ex-hippie had to compete with an existing company that had a really cute name and sold its service for $4.95 a month, so he decided to do the same, which meant that he wasn’t going to make much profit on each sale, and he had to cut corners wherever he could, (even though he somehow attracted $53 million in venture capital, most of which went into advertising.)

Well, one of the corners he cut (and so did the competitor with the cute name) was in the data center. He figured that data stored in his data center for a mere $5 a month wasn’t valuable enough to protect with enterprise-level equipment and best-in-class storage procedures. So he bought a brand of cheap disk controllers that home users buy, and he didn’t bother to mirror the data offsite to another data center. He had no backup for the backup.

One day the cheap equipment failed under the weight of a million backups of Miley Cyrus pictures and songs, and a lot of data was lost. The ex-hippie blamed the disk controller people and sued their pants off to divert your attention, and his company got a big ole’ black eye in the media spotlight.

But you know what? The company’s sales were not affected when this story went public. Either you did not do your homework before deciding to trust them with your only picture of you with Peter Mayhew, or you just didn’t care.

But whose fault is it? Well, it’s YOUR FAULT for not being willing to spend enough money for your backups so the ex-hippie could afford to buy descent equipment, and a mirrored data center (a backup for his backup) or some other kind of backup-backup.

If you really cared about your collection of 11,000 cornbread recipes from the 1200s to 1923, you would shop for backup services based on features, Service Level Agreements, and infrastructure rather than mere price alone. I PROMISE you, you will not find an online backup service for $5/month that can guarantee your data will be there when you need it.

Have a look at the web site for ANY $5/month backup service. Find the Terms, or the Service Agreement, or whatever it’s called. Read it and you will discover that by signing up for their service you are agreeing that they have no responsibility whatsoever for giving your data back to you. And how can they? For $5/month they can’t afford that kind of liability.

At $5/month there are other corners that need to be cut, too. For example, bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive, so they ration it. Your Internet connection may be capable of 20gb, but you can be sure you won’t be allowed to back up or restore at that speed. In many cases you’ll be limited to 128K. At that speed it will take days to back up your beloved Special Edition of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. (the French guard taunting Arthur from the wall, Scene eight)

Most online backup services require software to be installed on your computer. It’s called a “Client” or an “Agent,” and it’s what does the work of backing up and restoring your files. The capabilities of a $5/month backup agent are worth, well, about $5. You get a cheap, virtually featureless bit of software that does the bare minimum.

Forget being able to set your own file retention policy. Don’t even think about backing up SQL Server, Exchange, Outlook email, Lotus, Active Directory, and System State. You can only dream about things like great tech support, strong encryption, automatic failover, HIPAA compliance, and hundreds of other really important big words you will never see for $5 a month; and you don’t realize you need until you really need them, and by then it’s too late.

Now, if you’re just storing copies of those snapshots you took at last year’s RealmsCon (you cosplayed as Gandalf and totally embarrassed yourself with Tifa Lockhart, remember that?) or other non-business data that you also have backed up on CDs, and you aren’t relying on your $5/month backup service to protect your only copies, maybe you can afford to risk the $5.

But when you grow up and need an adult’s online backup service that you can trust for your business data and anything else irreplaceable, I hope you look beyond price. I hope you realize that ESPECIALLY in the Online Backup world, YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.

I hope you are willing to spend enough money to allow your Service Provider to support you the way you deserve, with the resources and equipment that can guarantee your data will be back to you quickly when you most desperately need it; and I hope you select a LOCAL online backup expert who can actually be there when you need help.

And one last thing – the next time I hear you whimper, “But I can get it from XYZ company for fifteen cents a gigabyte!” I might just pull the trigger on this phaser, and then at least one of us isn’t going to whine any more.

Rob is the CEO of Remote Backup Systems, Inc., developers of the RBackup and Mercury Online Backup platforms, supporting more than 8,500 commercial online backup services in 64 countries. http://remote-backup.com

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