We have been hearing about the rise of cloud storage and indeed, in the past few months a meteoric rise has been observed in both the number of services and the capacity of each of them. Let me just name a few –
Services like Google Drive and Skydrive while are available to a person as soon as he creates an email in Gmail or Hotmail. Other services like Box and Dropbox are also actively and rather aggressively wooing users. For example, Box has tied up with Sony to give 50GB to its smartphone users.
Dropbox is of course easiest and most popular to use and one of the first to give the cloud storage its distinct direction. Whereas MediaFire and Mega have old love from their old-time (sometimes shady) users.
Now, add to that the always connected to internet devices and we do have a strong case for such devices. I am myself a user of almost all the above services and yes they are extremely useful in some cases.
That is the crux of the issue – Some cases… These include my documents, ebooks, a few important pictures and sometimes a video or two. But when it comes to backing up my complete collection of movies or TV shows I go to my trusty hard disk.
Even my whole collection of pictures cannot be stored in the online storage that I have. Of course, one might say that I can get more storage and indeed I can but what of the cost of the storage and the bandwidth needed to upload the items.
Bandwidth is a precious item, even more so in a country like ours. Also, with the speeds we have, imagine uploading a whole collection of pictures (all HD) that amounts to nearly over 50GB. Even uploaded, imagine downloading the whole content again!!!
And a 1 Terabyte Hard Disk now costing as low as Rs. 5000 – Even Solid State Drives cost far less than the total cost of uploading and downloading the whole content even once.
Have a thought experiment or a wild guess – What will be costlier- Getting 500GB content through courier or letting someone download it at his or her end. Or even, which will take more time.
The answer to both the questions is of course – the hard way!
And this is never going to change.
As the cost of bandwidth decreases so will the cost of storage. Each day research is going on to increase the amount of storage in smallest of area. In fact, if you do not trust your backup, then backup your backup HD with another HD. A periodic check on each and you should never lose your data.
What is your take on this? Can online storage be an actual substitute for backup or will it remain just for the occasional file transfer or a way of keeping the same file on multiple devices. While you guys ponder over this I leave you with this article to help with the thought.