Comments on: Three Cloud Storage Alternatives

By: Michael H.G. Schmidt

Michael H.G. Schmidt — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:10:14 +0000

@ Mark: “What are “Fortune 500″ servers?”

I think he means “big” and reliable machines. Maybe these machines are located in a banks datacenter or so.

But most likely its only management bullshit blabla. They offer unlimited backup space for $4.95 a month. Do you think this will work ? Yeah – maybe they store your data like “backblaze” does: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

On the first look nice. But on the second its UGLY. Its not safe – they know nothing about storage. Do you really want to backup your precious data on this garbage ? Good luck !

In the meantime i will stay with TSM. Its mature and reliant. Sure – its not cheap. But in terms of doing backup cheap means that you dont have real backup at all. And thats the truth. Sorry folks.

Regards,

Michael H.G. Schmidt

By: darwyn4

darwyn4 — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:13:18 +0000

i think humyo.com is the best :) 10 GB of free storage!

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:04:22 +0000

I personally prefer Wuala to store my files. I like the fact that they encrypt files on my computer so that I'm really still the owner and they can't access all my data. Furthermore I appreciate the option to trade my local storage against online storage.

By: p_15_s

p_15_s — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:55:28 +0000

I recommend Memopal. Company has changed the selling price, now $49 for 150Gb, less expansive than Fabrik. Memopal is very conveniet. I saved all my files and I’m quiet ’cause they are safe.

By: George Lucas

George Lucas — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:42:53 +0000

Could you guys review free cloud hosting services? Also, need a cloud data hosting product with a good client–could you review cloud clients? thank you

By: Bitnoid

Bitnoid — Tue, 13 May 2008 04:49:47 +0000

For those interested in building and owning their own cloud storage infrastructure you might want to check out a company called Caringo. Very cool clustered storage using commodity server hardware that is self healing and self managing. Very low cost up front and minimal administrative effort. It’s not a service, it’s a product and it enables you to implement the kind of infrastructure some of the cloud providers use.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:01:40 +0000

I’ve been trialing idrive (idrive.com). I rarely see it mentioned in these types of reviews, but it appears to be a more cost effective online storage solution than most of the others.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:23:40 +0000

@ 1 Erin

What are "Fortune 500" servers?

By: Don Bell

Don Bell — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:42:30 +0000

I’m currently using a startup Cloud storage provider called SMEStorage (www.smestorage.com). They have not officially launched yet but these guys have some cool stuff. Firstly their back-end is Amazon S3 so the storage is secure. Currently you subscribe to their service but they tell me they are soon going to open it up so you can enter your own Amazon S3 keys and pay a $1 a month for their services.

You can do all the usual stuff like upload your files, tag etc. They have a nice File Browser. They also allow file sharing via email in which you can set a deadline for the link to the file to expire which is nice. The killer feature for me is the group sharing functionality in which you can create a group, add users to the group and then share a file with the group or individual users – I use this a lot as a mechanism to keep partners up to date with collateral for my business.

They released an API a while back so you can access all these features via their REST API, and I’m currently testing the beta of a Firefox plug-in that uses this API.

Lastly I’m beta testing their IPhone version which I have to say is pretty amazing. This is at http://thesmespace.com/smeutils/msmestorage/.

As far as I know these guys have not launched yet and there is little documentation but they have put a lot thought into what they are doing and I thought they deserved a mention as they are taking the cloud services and layering useful functionality on top of it.

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:36:30 +0000

you totally forgot one of the major players… Nirvanix. Like Amazon S3 they have REST and SOAP services, for the easy to access API component, they are also in the pay-as-you-go model for max scalability or “infinite expansion” as you call it. Word around town is they have faster upload times and much better uptime statistics. And @ Calvin… yes they do exist, and they’re long out of beta. pretty cool stuff. for those interested: http://www.nirvanix.com

By: Calvin Spealman

Calvin Spealman — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:55:15 +0000

So the article here about 3 cloud storage options includes 1 that is closed beta and 1 that doesnt even exist yet?

By: Mike Gunderloy

Mike Gunderloy — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:10:57 +0000

Simon – we covered AppEngine: http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/04/21/hands-on-with-google-app-engine/ – they seem to be opening up the beta progressively.

But right now, I don’t think it’s in the “cloud storage” category. There’s not a direct API specifically for storage access from outside of AppEngine (though you could code your own in Python). More to the point, there’s a 500MB per application fixed storage limit. They might remove or raise that after the service comes out of beta, but right now AppEngine is clearly aimed at the application layer rather than the storage layer.

By: Simon Rain

Simon Rain — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:06:32 +0000

there is also a new similar service from Google called AppEngine.

It's mainly for web applications more than just storage but their package include all 3 Amazon services ( EC2, S3 and SimpleDB ).

I'm not sure if you can choose which of the 3 options you can use or if you have to build your entire application with their API.

I know when it just came out, it only supported Python but they are planning on making it available for multiple programming languages.

Unfortunately for now, it is being tested and limited to only 10 000 developers.

http://code.google.com/appengine/

The SDK is available for download.

By: Erin

Erin — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:03:23 +0000

Backing up your data is also important, and doing so online provides many benefits – automated behind-the-scenes process, protects against fire/theft, protects all your data, etc. Fabrik offers an online backup service called, Fabrik Ultimate Backup, http://www.FabrikUltimateBackup.com. You get 2GB for free, or you can upgrade to unlimited capacity for only $4.95 per month. Data is encrypted and safe, and is stored on Fortune 500 servers, so it will be there if/when you need it.

Erin Fabrik Inc.