Web 2.0: The problem with online backup

So I was listening to a podcast recently, more on that later, and I decided to try and get more serious about my back solutions. Awhile back I invested in a wireless base station with a USB port that I could plug a hard drive into so that I could perform wireless backups here at home. I was using a program called Chronosync to perform the backups daily, but unfortunately it was an imperfect solution.

When Apple announced that one of the major new features of their new Leopard operating system would be automatic backup via Time Machine, and that this backup would be possible over a wireless network to an attached drive, exactly my setup. Unfortunately that feature went out the window at the last minute and so I was stuck plugging my laptop into the hard drive about once a week and backing up that way, an even less ideal solution than before.

So this has been my state of affairs for a few months now since I upgraded my laptop to Leopard. After listening to the afore-mentioned podcast, which is called Macbreak Tech for those interested, I decided to try an online backup solution.

What this means is trying to backup up all the important files on my computer to the internet, or the cloud as it is sometimes called amongst those impressed by buzz words. I had already been doing something like this by backing up some critical files and things like my address book and calendar to iDisk, which is online storage you get when you buy a .Mac account. Unfortunately .Mac only gives you 10 Gigabytes of storage at the base price of $100, and even if you’re willing to pay another $100 you can only get a maximum of 30 Gigabytes. So this meant I had to look for another solution.

There are a bunch of online backup solutions starting to show up nowadays like Carbonite. I decided to go in another direction, however. Amazon has started offering online backup to their own secure servers called S3. They charge per Gigabyte, but the cost is incredibly low. In conjunction with another new service called Jungle Disk that allows you to see your S3 storage as a drive on your computer and easily backup to it I thought I had found my perfect solution.

Unfortunately this was not to be the case. I was stymied by what should have been the most obvious impediment to my goal, but which I had been blind to: our countries piss poor broadband infrastructure. It turns out that when you’re trying to backup 50+ gigabytes of stuff to the internet you need a really fast connection or a very long time. Lacking the latter I needed the former, but I quickly found out it wasn’t available.

Upload speed for my lowly DSL line was only about 300 kbps, even after I had upgraded to Verizon’s upgraded service I was only getting 480 kbps. For those who don’t know, when you do the math it turn out it would take about fourteen hours to upload everything I wanted to backup, and that’s assuming that I got the maximum speed for that whole period of time, which is unlikely.

In my quest for other options I looked into Verizon’s Fios service, which offers upload speeds up to 15Mbps, or 30 times faster than what I was getting, but alas this service was not available at our house. Turns out an extremely small minority of households in the Unites States have access to any kind of service like Fios. It also turns out that amongst industrialized nations the U.S. lags far behind in terms of having access to ultra high speed internet.

What this means for me is that my dream of backing up transparently to the cloud will have to wait at least until I can get Fios at our house. Even then I might find myself stymied by the fact that companies like Verizon try to put hard caps on the amount of data you can send to the internet, so even with 15Mbps speeds I may not be able to do what I want. Which is a shame really as I can’t think of a more secure way to backup the photos, music and other important files I’ve collected on my computer. Looks like it’s back to my imperfect solutions for now.