Harkening back to the very first entry in this blog, which was about “Carbonite” backup; which I judged to be “not ready for me” yet. Yet, I liked the idea of online backup and investigated several other services available at that time (2008). I eventually settled on Elephantdrive.com.
My experience with elephantdrive has been a bit rocky. Initially, their client and backup strategy wasn’t quite ready for prime time – it sometimes seemed to get stuck in some kind of retry/fail loop. Their restore capability sometimes failed my test restorations in odd ways. Their upload activity logs were nonsensical. They fixed these problems over time, and for the last year or so I’ve had no complaints. Elephantdrive’s overwhelming virtue is that they offer cheap, unlimited backups; and I have reasonable confidence that if I survive the tsunami that destroys my house and computer, I can still get my lifetime of data back.
Elephantdrive was one of the sites hit by the recent “Amazon Cloud” outage. While investigating and waiting for Elephantdrive to resume service, I found some very interesting entries on their official blog, explaining why they had discontined offering unlimited backups. They still haven’t officially informed me that I will soon be paying 4x as much for the same service, but their business logic is hard to argue with. Essentially, by offering unlimited service, they attract all the parasites (like me) who take them at their word and use too much service to be economical to support.
So, with no hard feelings, I’ll be leaving Elephantdrive soon, for another vendor who still believes that unlimited service is feasible. Their economic problems are interesting, but they’re not my problem.
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This entry was posted on May 9, 2011 at 10:09 am and is filed under Commentary, software reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Online Backup
Harkening back to the very first entry in this blog, which was about “Carbonite” backup; which I judged to be “not ready for me” yet. Yet, I liked the idea of online backup and investigated several other services available at that time (2008). I eventually settled on Elephantdrive.com.
My experience with elephantdrive has been a bit rocky. Initially, their client and backup strategy wasn’t quite ready for prime time – it sometimes seemed to get stuck in some kind of retry/fail loop. Their restore capability sometimes failed my test restorations in odd ways. Their upload activity logs were nonsensical. They fixed these problems over time, and for the last year or so I’ve had no complaints. Elephantdrive’s overwhelming virtue is that they offer cheap, unlimited backups; and I have reasonable confidence that if I survive the tsunami that destroys my house and computer, I can still get my lifetime of data back.
Elephantdrive was one of the sites hit by the recent “Amazon Cloud” outage. While investigating and waiting for Elephantdrive to resume service, I found some very interesting entries on their official blog, explaining why they had discontined offering unlimited backups. They still haven’t officially informed me that I will soon be paying 4x as much for the same service, but their business logic is hard to argue with. Essentially, by offering unlimited service, they attract all the parasites (like me) who take them at their word and use too much service to be economical to support.
So, with no hard feelings, I’ll be leaving Elephantdrive soon, for another vendor who still believes that unlimited service is feasible. Their economic problems are interesting, but they’re not my problem.
Like this:
This entry was posted on May 9, 2011 at 10:09 am and is filed under Commentary, software reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.