Thursday, February 14, 2013

Online File Backup Services or a Network Drive Compared?

The last thing you want is for your hard drive to crash and to lose your work, your photos or your music collection. Having lost a hard drive in college, I vowed to always have a file backup system. Currently I use two, one hard drive at home for all of my photos, and a lot of my documents backed up in Google Drive. But is Google Drive the best priced? I decided to check.

There are several well known cloud file backup services: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box.com and Cubby. How do their $/GB compare?

Google Drive: $0.60/GB (from 100GB - 16TB)  -- don't opt for the 25GB plan or you'll pay $1.20/GB
Cubby: $0.84/GB (from 100GB - 1TB)
Dropbox: $1.00/GB (only 100, 200, and 500GB options)
Box.com: $4.80/GB (only 25 or 50GB options)

Source data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnUTnemeUdP7dHk4STNubnJrUWxzekZYeV83MTQ0QlE&usp=sharing

So yes, I'm still correct in using Google Drive (especially since I'm on a legacy plan of $5 for 20GB). However, that's just a small subset of your online options, there are dozens of other providers.

At these prices though, it raises the question, wouldn't it be cheaper to get a network drive? There are the high end Apple Time Capsules to other reputable providers like Western Digital and Seagate. The big plus side they're on your network and accessible by USB3, so if you need to watch that movie you have backed up you can do so without waiting for it to download off the web. Of course the downside of these is that they're in your home and prone to fire/theft.

What do you have set-up?

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2 comments:

  1. UnknownFebruary 14, 2013 at 4:50 PM

    As you say, the trouble with network drives is that they don't protect against stuff like fire, flood and theft. I use a network drive+time machine for primary backup, and then a web-based backup as a secondary.

    Carbonite . com - $60/year for your entire hard drive, regardless of the size. I have a 1TB hard drive, but it's only about 1/2 full, so I'm essentially paying $0.10 / GB /mo, but the more I fill up the drive, the better it will be.

    It's too clunky to use as a cloud drive, but I put all of my documents into a strange amalgam of Gdrive, dropbox and sugarsync, and if all you want is online backup, it works quite well.

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    Replies
    1. testFebruary 17, 2013 at 8:16 PM

      Cool, thanks Kevin! Are you happy with the network drive that you use?

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