What does the future hold for backups?

Well that’s an easy question; the answer is obviously online backup services. Or is it? With the current upload speeds on home cable & ADSL broadband connections online backup services are only practical if your producing lets say 10 – 30GB of data per month. But what about for those who are constantly generating in the region of 100GB+ per month?

I personally have 2TB of storage on various hard drives and my file server, which is constantly full, and also constantly changing. Unfortunately I’m on ADSL with just 256kbps of upload bandwidth, and to upload the current 2TB would take approximately 26 months, by which time I’d probably have easily generated another 2TB of content! So online backup in my case is just not an option. So what about external hard drives? Well to me, an external hard drive just isn’t a backup; it’s too easy to damage the drive when the time comes that you actually need it, for example dropping it.

Of course, CD / DVD / Blu-Ray and USB flash drives are out of the question either because of the quantity required or the price. So what do I use? Call me old fashioned but I’m using a SCSI LTO 1 tape drive, it was cheap (second hand) its reasonably fast at 15MB a second and each tape can hold 100GB (200GB compressed) I just simply span the data over multiple tapes. Obviously I could get an LTO4 drive which can store 800/1600GB but it also costs a lot more.

The day that online backup becomes convenient for everybody will be the day the ISP’s introduce broadband packages with a decent upload, which I don’t see happening in the UK for a long time!