BackBlaze online backup
BackBlaze presented an online backup system similar to TimeMachine but totally online, with a well-designed security, and recovery options:
On the security side, your datas are transmitted over SSL encryption, disabling anyone to get them on the net, and the ability to encrypt them by a private key to be sure that even in case of Blaze system’s being hacked, your datas will stay encrypted and safe. Nice point!
On the recovery side, it naturally offers the ability to recover any file you are saving, with a good interface, but there’s an alternative to retrieve hundreds of gigabyte of datas in case of lost computer, fire, stolen computer or hard-disk total failure: they send you a USB hard-drive with your full backup set inside! Great!
It even let you backup on the road, on an hotel, anywhere in the world, or recover your files from any location. I will be happy if they add a web interface to enable access to your files from a single browser (cybercoffee, hotel, etc).
All that for $5/month ($50/year), except for the recovery hard-drive, at 200$ with a night delivery, price tag is really correct!
There’s some drawbacks, naturally, the price seems high for home-user, with $150/3 years, the price tag of a 1TB backup hard-drive with the speed of local hard-drive instead internet communication (200X faster average!).
And talking about speed, on my high-speed cable Internet access, when I put 15GB of Photos inside my laptop (a day of shooting sessions), it will takes less than 15 minutes to backup them on an USB2 external hard-drive, but more than 2 days (and probably 3 or 4) to backup by Internet, letting the laptop always connected, without any pause, it’s irrealistic!
So BackBlaze is a real great backup system, but not targeted at user that have huge multimedia files (or huge files), and it may be real great for SOHO or mid-size companies to outsource their backups with flexibility!