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Comment by chadnickbok | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a better argument to make is that, since 2009, "Cloud Storage" has taken off alongside Amazon's S3 service.

So while folks who really do need to reliably store 500GB of stuff might still be looking at RAID, for the 'average' end-user they have a far better solution than complicated multi-disk setups.

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The "average" end user also doesn't want to spend weeks uploading 1TB of files to the cloud.

Imagine a typical American or Canadian "broadband" consumer internet connection with 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up. If you keep your computer on 8 hours a day, it will take just over 9 months to upload 1TB of data to the cloud at that speed. A multi-TB RAID array would take years to back up. (This is why I think Backblaze et al. can afford to offer "unlimited backup" for a flat monthly fee. The customer's ISP is doing all the limiting for them!)

It was a major PITA when I first started using online backup services while in Canada. (TekSavvy FTW!) Despite paying for one of their faster plans, I had to keep my computer on for a couple of weeks 24/7 to make the initial backup.

Is there an opportunity for a well-known backup vendor to have shopfronts in malls that are wired into a high-speed backbone? Take them your external USB, go have lunch in the food court, come back later when the backup is complete.

'YOUR PHOTOS BACKED UP TO CLOUD WHILE U WAIT'

You don't even need the high-speed backbone. You could backup the files to a local drive. The latency might be bad, but trucks still have higher bandwidth then the internet.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

True absolutely. But there's something more appealing to me about handing a drive across a counter, knowing it will be backed up in a few hours (assuming that is practical), and ready for me to be confirmed back home via my higher-download-speed broadband; rather than have the drive rattle across the country in a truck, sit in a mail room, and finally get processed X days/weeks later...

It could be feasible in the UK; we can do same-day courier across the country, although I suspect it'd be expensive at low volume. Next day post gets there the next day pretty much every time, though.

So Mall Backup Co takes two copies immediately. One on their local node and one that gets shipped back to base.

As soon as you get home you can access your backup (transparently) from the mall node. Then when the drive gets back to base it does another verification run and instructs the node that it can re-use that space.

AWS allows you to mail drives in for import/export:

http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

Sure, network bandwidth is an issue, and getting a fast enough connection at a mall might be interesting.

What's also fun: USB speeds. I found a transfer time calculator - http://techinternets.com/copy_calc - and, well, 4 terabytes at USB 2.0 speeds (480 mb/s) would take over 21 hours, or 3 hours at USB 3.0 speeds. Those are at optimal wire speeds, less 10% for overhead.

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