Thursday October 26, 2006

Last month, AT&T launched an automated, network backup service for consumers called AT&T Online Vault. It transparently encrypts and backs up files from a user's home PC and incrementally transfers them to AT&T's secure, professionally run datacenter.

I've been thinking lately about the consumer desktop experience and how bad it is. And how much worse it will get as consumers continue to generate larger and larger piles of data that they actually care about with no good way to protect that data from loss. We're talking about digital photos and, increasingly, digital video--stuff people really care about, stuff they want to keep safe for a long time, and stuff they want to migrate forward as they upgrade to new machines.

Most consumers lack the skill and patience needed to back up their machines. And this is even more true now that local disk drive sizes far outstrip the size of DVDs and CDs, making the entire process all that more ungainly. If you are thinking, "shame on them for not backing up their data if they really care about it", then shame on you for your techo-arrogance. It's precisely that attitude that has lead to the crap exerience our industry offers the home computer user. But I digress.

Online Vault looks like an excellent and much needed step towards improving the home computer experience. The service costs $2 per gigabyte per month with a $17.95 per month maximum. Available for Windows 2000 and XP. No Mac version currently, but Mac users have .Mac, arguably the best overall service for safely storing desktop state in the network where it belongs.