Looking at the key figures of the offering, one does indeed look rather bewildered: the price of EUR 11.90 per month includes only 500 MB. An (expensive) CD blank costs EUR 1 and holds 700 MB.
Apart from that, the costs are quite hefty when you consider typical disk usage patterns (the usual collector-and-hunter scenario of a typical user). Let me take my own notebook's hard drive as an example: 30 GB in use. If I subtract the operating system and installed applications, a good 20 GB remains. Of that, another 8 GB is music (all originals, so no comments here!), which I can also subtract - still leaves 12 GB. Of that, another 2 GB or so of accumulated downloads that don't necessarily need to be backed up. 10 GB remain that I can't quite categorize, so sorting through them would be more work than I'm comfortable with. A lot.
But I can't afford to pay for 10 GB per month at T-Com's prices: that's EUR 11.90 for the first 500 MB and then EUR 5.80 for every additional half GB, so a total of EUR 122.10 per month for the storage. Plus I still have to pay EUR 200 for the initial upload of all the data - and if I don't have a flat rate, I also pay the internet costs on top.
If I back up these 10 GB to multiple DVDs, I need 2-3 media (if you organize it yourself it's usually not optimal, so one medium more) - for a total of around EUR 10 for the media at expensive prices.
And the duration of the backup won't be any faster than uploading via the rather thin upstream channels of typical DSL connections. 128 KBit/sec is about 7.5 MB per minute, or about 450 MB per hour - so 22 hours for the backup over the line, if it's free and unoccupied and no disruptions occur.
And the argument about the lack of qualified staff for backup: if you want to back up the data with T-Com's solution over DSL, and you don't want the costs to eat you alive, and the whole thing needs to run overnight, an employee must select the data and prepare it for backup - gathering it in directories, or structuring the directories accordingly, etc. But that's already the biggest part of the work in any backup - figuring out which data should be backed up and how. The rest is just one click with today's backup solutions for end users and the necessary frequent changing of DVD or CD blanks (or MO or tape if the user prefers reasonably reliable backups).
Somehow I have the feeling that T-Com has calculated things a bit strangely here. Sounds similar to Apple's calculation with .Mac Backup. Except that Apple didn't want to back up mass data over the internet in the first place, but only settings and selected file areas; Apple's backup program backs up mass data like pictures and music locally to hard drives by default.
A usable backup solution on the internet would really be nice. But so far I haven't seen one that would have made sense for DSL users...
The original article is on heise online news at this link.