Why Cloud Storage Is Lousy For Enterprises (and Individuals)

storagedude points to this article at Enterprise Storage Forum which argues that cloud-based storage options have fatal limitations for both businesses and individuals: "The article makes the argument that high volumes of data and bandwidth limitations make external cloud storage all but useless for enterprises because it could take months to restore the data in a disaster. It also appears to be a consumer problem — the author spent three months replicating 1TB of home data via cable modem to an online backup service." Seems like those off-site incremental storage firms could dispatch a station wagon full of tapes, for enough money. Update: Here's another reason, for Sidekick users: reader 1ini was one of several to point out an alert from T-Mobile that "...personal information stored on your device — such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos — that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."

Comments

sigh...

[wizardforce]

the author spent three months replicating 1TB of home data via cable modem to an online backup service.

Surely the 100$ the author "saved" by doing that could not have been worth the three months it took? That's about 140 kbps... You could buy yourself a 100$ TB drive and have a local system set to back up and restore your data whenever you need and it won't take 3 months for the data to get there and back. *And* you have control over your data and its security. *And* it would probably be cheaper anyway in the end.

My argument against cloud storage: Bell is my ISP

[Interoperable]

They charge $2.50/GB if you go over your monthly transfer limit. If I lost my data and needed to replace it quickly (assuming I for some reason chose to back up multimedia in the cloud and then suddenly needed all my DVDs at once) it would cost considerably more than buying a highly redundant RAID array.