Since Mozy has lost their minds...

Why do you think the price of external drives will go up? I've casually (VERY casually) watched the price of storage media for probably 20 years or so. Back in the day, I watched it pretty close. I remember talking w/ a co-worker when the price of PC storage finally went below the $1/mb barrier. I don't remember the time frame when it broke the $1/gb barrier, but I don't think it was more than a couple of years ago. Now, you can get 2tb external drives for ~$100 on sale. 1tb portables (no extra power supply) are ~$100.

There was a guideline (for lack of a better term) that said computing power doubles every 18 months. That seemed to hold true from back in the 50's and 60's through to the current day. I readily admit that I have not looked into the veracity of this, but at first glance, I think it's not that far off.

What has gone along w/ that, is a decrease in prices. I think it's gotten to a point where prices are probably bottomed out, and now you'll just get more for the same money, going forward. For example, you can buy laptops now from anywhere from ~$350 - $700. Sure, you can spend a lot more than that if you want, but you're adding more stuff (more RAM, separate video card, Blu-Ray, etc.). That price point was pretty much the same 2 years ago when I bought my laptop. The big difference between that $500 laptop I bought in 3/09 and what I can get for that same $500 today, is the processing power and more RAM.

The point I'm trying to make, in a very long-winded way, is that in my experience, the price per unit of storage space has steadily declined over the last 20+ years. Baring some external factor that would cause a rise in electronics prices in general, I can't see the cost of storage going up.

Please fill me in here. I do not use these services, so I am not 100% familiar with how other people use them, but something seems amiss here... at least to me.

Many people are concerned about time in terms of retrieving their files. If the service is used merely as a back-up... meaning that you already have the files at home, also... wouldn't this be a moot point? I mean, find another service, upload the files to them, let Mozy do what they will, and be done.

Judging from some of the comments here, it seems that many are using these services as their primary, and possibly only, file storage (for these particular files). Doesn't that thwart the intent and concept of having a back-up? The purpose of having an off-site back-up is to be covered in cases of outside forces that can destroy on-site back-ups, i.e. fire, flood, tornadoes, and so on. I would think that one would keep on-site back-ups as well as flighty corporate policy would be included with these other potentials risks beyond our control.

Mk1Racer wrote in post #11793380
There was a guideline (for lack of a better term) that said computing power doubles every 18 months. That seemed to hold true from back in the 50's and 60's through to the current day.

Moore's Law:

"The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months."

http://www.intel.com …museum/exhibits​/moore.htm

Paid $103.95 for three years of unlimited Carbonite. Still have two to go so we'll see.

I am switching to crashplan I think, I am testing it now and it seems to work pretty good and I like the fact that on mac you can backup locally which doesnt work with Mozy anyway, I had many problems with Mozy and their customer support is nearly useless anyway !

pretty much anything EMC touches turns to crap imo they just want to buy the technology to use it for overpriced business options and could care less about us as we are small potatoes

tekkie wrote in post #11801634
pretty much anything EMC touches turns to crap imo they just want to buy the technology to use it for overpriced business options and could care less about us as we are small potatoes

As I said earlier, you can't make money at $5 a month selling any kind of significant storage space. It costs more than that for the bandwidth, much less the storage. It's not that you are small potatoes, it is that you are a money losing customer.

tkbslc wrote in post #11801650
As I said earlier, you can't make money at $5 a month selling any kind of significant storage space. It costs more than that for the bandwidth, much less the storage. It's not that you are small potatoes, it is that you are a money losing customer.

there seems to be an awful lot of companies doing it and I doubt they are all doing it for nothing, the other companies are trying to takeover the business from Mozy (crashplan is offering discounts and a guaranteed 4yr unlimited plan) so obviously there is money to be made or they wouldnt be doing it

I dont dispute the fact that its not a big profitable business but their pricing changes are ludicrous, mine would go up almost 10 times at 400GB !

EMC wants to get out of the consumer world thats obvious and I can understand that they just went about it the wrong way !

Why do you think they are all setting weird caps and upload terms like "no USB drives"? Their business plan made unrealistic assumptions like 50GB would be more than anyone could use.

LIke I said, I work in storage and systems and you just can't put together a data center to run this kind of business on what they are charging unless you have 100 customers uploading 1GB for every 2 that are uploading 100GB.

Just as an idea, I have a lower tier ISCSI storage pool from HP. It cost about $30k for 10TB of storage on SATA disks. That's bottom end stuff for this kind of business. Our other high performance fibre channel storage system was about 7x that much for not much more storage. Bandwidth is $3000 a month for a 10MB link for us. A few system engineers to set it up and run the datacenter would be at least $250k a year with taxes and benefits. Do the math.

tkbslc wrote in post #11801650
It's not that you are small potatoes, it is that you are a money losing customer.

Ummm... isn't that the same thing?

photoguy6405 wrote in post #11801767
Ummm... isn't that the same thing?

I don't think so. I spend $1000 a year at online camera shops, so I am sure I am a small customer compared to, say, a big newspaper outfit. But I don't think I cost B&H money to keep me as a customer. If mozy is taking $50 a year from you and it costs them $50 a month to maintain your disk space, well that's not a customer they want to keep, is it?

I work in IT also, I manage 3 datacenters where we have EMC / IBM & Netapp SANs I am aware what the costs are, if it wasn't possible then they would be doing it.

your missing one important part I think its the fact that most of this is static data and the majority of it is on tape drives not on disk, the cost there is far less than keeping it on hard drives

look at the pricing of the new netapps they are pretty cheap nowadays, much cheaper than a few years ago, nowhere near 30k for 10TB now, but I guess that depends how their system writes the data... I dont know if they have the flexibility of having a ton of small systems vs a big one

anyway I dont think they are going to get rich, and I agree their business model was dumb from the start as well, unlimited is just dumb when the data is just getting bigger and bigger

BUT again they went about this whole change the wrong way. If they had created a 50,125, 500, 1TB tier I think they could have kept a crapload of customers that they just ticked off. They did it on purpose imo to just get rid of the customers because they dont want to deal with small potatoes they want to use it for businesses that will pay alot more for the same thing.

Just a note for those that consider using Carbonite. Once you have more than 200 GB your upload speed will be reduced to 100 kbit/s. Just so you know (its stated in their FAQ)

With Mozy I can as far as I can tell use my full 5 mbit upload. I know this because not long ago I upgraded my upload from 2 to 5 mbit/s and I saw immedaite faster backup time.

tommykjensen wrote in post #11801802
Just a note for those that consider using Carbonite. Once you have more than 200 GB your upload speed will be reduced to 100 kbit/s. Just so you know (its stated in their FAQ)

that blows, from what I read crashplan doesnt limit it

with Mozy I read alot of people saying theirs was limited and I saw it on mine where it was capped at 1Mbs until recently where it finally seemed to go past that

tekkie wrote in post #11801792
anyway I dont think they are going to get rich, and I agree their business model was dumb from the start as well, unlimited is just dumb when the data is just getting bigger and bigger

BUT again they went about this whole change the wrong way. If they had created a 50,125, 500, 1TB tier I think they could have kept a crapload of customers that they just ticked off. They did it on purpose imo to just get rid of the customers because they dont want to deal with small potatoes they want to use it for businesses that will pay alot more for the same thing.

That I can agree with. Stop being stupid about the way you market things and just be upfront and honest. Just like my cell phone provider gives me an unlimited data plan that excludes me from 3G when I hit 5GB a month.

I just don't see how people expect to get truly unlimited online storage for $50 a year is what I am saying. I know I couldn't set up a datacenter to provide that and still sleep at night.

tkbslc wrote in post #11801848
That I can agree with. I just don't see how people expect to get unlimited online storage for $50 a year. I know I couldn't set up a datacenter to provide that and still sleep at night.

well for now we can because we can get it from competitors lol

but long term I am not sure that will hold true, but with cheap things like SATA drobos and 2TB drives nowadays it may continue for some time

I think if your creative it maybe possible with a bunch of low end storage and then backup / archiving... but yeah I wouldnt want to do it either