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Datto Launches Datto Drive For SMBs; Offers 1TB at $10 a Month For Unlimited Users (dattodrive.com)

Posted by msmash on from the in-quest-for-cloud dept.

Austin McChord, Datto's founder writes: In the era of nearly free cloud storage why on earth am I paying $15 a month per user (for Dropbox and Box). This seems absurd. As the founder of a cloud storage company I thought we could fix this. We combined OwnCloud which is an enterprise level open source file sync and share solution with our skills in infrastructure. Today we are launching Datto Drive, a file sync and share service for businesses that costs just $10 a month for unlimited users and 1TB of combined storage. To get started we are giving the first year away free for the first million businesses that sign up. One thing I'm worried about is whether this service will exist for more than a couple of years. We've seen plenty of startups offer us interesting services at great prices over the past few years, but many of them disappear. Tech Republic has more information about the aforementioned service. Update: 05/02 17:09 GMT by M : Reader torrija points us to a service called HubiC which offers 10TB for 5 euro a month. He adds that the feature is limited to one user, though.

6 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Slashvert... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes indeed.

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    1. Re:Slashvert... by Zibodiz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While this is the case, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the headline wasn't clickbaity, and pretty well summarized the ad. Also, even the summary said it was written by the company itself; it didn't try to pretend it was some sort of grassroots movement.
      Kudos, /.

    2. Re:Slashvert... by msmash · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Hi, I'm the editor who approved the submission. I found it interesting and thought readers here will find it useful. It's not an advertisement, and I intentionally edited the headline and body text to make things clear.

    3. Re:Slashvert... by bananaquackmoo · · Score: 2

      Ooookay... that still tells me nothing. "In the cloud" could mean replicated on one server, it could mean several servers, it could mean several different recovery zones. It could mean raid none, it could mean raid several, it could mean extra raid. It could mean offsite backups. It could mean fire sprinkled or not, underground and subject to flooding, high airflow vs no airflow...

    4. Re:Slashvert... by unrtst · · Score: 2

      $10 per month, or $120 per year. My NAS box offers 1TB of storage too. ...

      You noted it's on your lan. While that has its own advantages, it's not offsite. You also imply that it can't be accessed externally. That's your choice, but that's a huge limitation. Even if you did allow external access, your upload speed (which would be the download speed for you while you're away from home) is likely to be FAR slower than this service, or anything with a proper presence.

      Your home NAS certainly has value, but this fulfills a completely different need. And, for $120/year, getting 1TB for unlimited users is a pretty awesome deal compared to its competition, but they all take on some odd mix of limitations that make them a bit difficult to directly compare. They also have slightly different feature sets (ex. limited OS support, sync vrs backup and everywhere in between, encryption (client side, in transit, at rest, etc), etc).

      Just a couple examples:
      dropbox(sync): $99/year, 1TB space, one user
      dropbox(sync) business: $180/year/user, unlimited space, one user
      crashplan(backup): $60/year, unlimited storage, one COMPUTER
      crashplan(backup) family: $150/year, unlimited storage, 2-10 computers
      spideroak(backup+sync): $130/year, 1TB storage, 1 user
      datto drive(sync): $120/year, 1TB space, unlimited users

      I'm not exactly sure how to directly compare those. It will all depend significantly on your expected usage, number of users, volume of data, and desired features. Some of them compare a little more easily than others. Datto is the only one I'm aware of with unlimited users, which could offer some interesting solutions. For example, if you resold it per-user, you could sell 10 accounts at 10gb each for $1/month each and break even, or oversubscribe it.... though I'm sure the ToS does not allow resale like that.

  2. Datto is a reputable online backup vendor for biz by Fencepost · · Score: 2

    Datto's been around for a while and has some very nice products for onsite and online backup for businesses. They're not inexpensive, but one of the big things they offer is continuity - if you're using one of their appliances for online backup and a server goes down, you can spin up the most recent backup of that server as a VM on their hardware, with all connections tunneled back through the backup device on your network.

    Basically, ServerA has a hardware failure. Whoever's handling backups fires up the online backup image (or in-office depending on the size of appliance), the local backup appliance grabs the IP of the down server and tunnels all traffic to/from that local IP out to the remote VM. Not an ideal way to run, but functional for keeping at least core things going.

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