A few years ago I started seeing commercials for a new service called Portable On Demand Storage or PODS, where you can actually have what equates to a large shed delivered to your home/business to provide temporary additional storage onsite. While a similar idea to offer online data storage has been around for a few years, some of the larger software vendors and service providers are only now planning to offer this service to the general public.
A recent article in Ars Technica, "Google, Microsoft and Apple building online storage havens: you win" by Jacqui Cheng, mentions Microsoft, Google and Apple's foray into this service offering including the expected fee and capacity limitations. I would think as long as you have a reliable broadband connection, this could be a good solution for storing your digital assets (e-mail, music, photos, video, etc.), as opposed to burning this data to CD-R (700 MB storage capacity) or DVD-R (4.71 GB storage capacity).
A companion article, "Online backup solutions: a review", mentioned at the end provides a review of online storage providers that focus on backup solutions. From a personal standpoint I can see the value of both services for a typical end-user who wasn't interested in procuring an external hard drive, but would you be willing to trust a 3rd party with your precious data? I'm meeting with Iron Mountain this week to discuss offsite storage and I don't know if they will be able to allay our fears of putting corporate data into someone else's hands. Would anyone care to comment on their experience with online storage/backup providers?
» EMC Buys Online Storage Vendor from ITechTips
Storage behemoth, EMC (NYSE: EMC), recently acquired Utah-based Berkeley Data Systems, Inc., a privately-held provider of online information backup and recovery services for $76 Million. Berkeley Data Systems provides Mozy - the indust... [Read More]
Tracked on: October 10, 2007 6:51 AM | Permalink to Trackback