Wednesday April 11, 2007

I've been shopping for an online backup facility, a service that will back up the files on my laptop to a datacenter somewhere in the network, keeping them safe and encrypted. Both Mozy and Carbonite are working on Mac versions with Mozy's currently in beta. Both currently offer Windows versions.

I haven't yet made a decision. But I did learn something interesting I thought I'd share with others considering these or other, similar services.

As you shop for a backup service, pay attention to their policies limiting either how much data can be uploaded per day or how fast you can upload data to their site. Both Mozy and Carbonite have such throttles in place on their consumer versions with less stringent throttling available for their advanced or pro versions (Carbonite claims they will have an advanced version soon.)

Mozy limits uploads to 1 Mbit/second, which in practice is not the rate-limiting factor for many people since their uplinks run slower than this. Still, if you assume a usable 1 Mbit/second connection, it will take approximately 10 days to upload 100 GBytes of data.

Carbonite is more...interesting. They initially limit transfers to between 2-3 Gbytes per day. After the first 50 GBytes, Carbonite throttles the transfer rate to 500 MBytes per day. According to their estimates, transferring an initial 100 GByte backup would therefore take about 100 days. Ouch.