On 10 Apr 2007 23:37:16 -0700,
wrote:

I have been dabbling in the offsite tape storage game for a few
months...and I have been increasingly interested in the online data
backup scenario.

One of the questions i would like to throw at this forum is......Why
are Web hosters NOT really promoting any data hosting solutions AS
there is some technical viability in this?


1) Because they're _Web_ hosters. There are data hosters.

2) Just because it is possible doesn't necessarily make it
viable. You could just backup to a local drive/media/etc or
one in a remotely located system if it needs be off-site.
In other words there is no need for the middleman to do what
you could yourself.

3) It may take a lot of storage space, time, bandwidth to
do it.




If a company does manage to organise an online backup procedure -
what is the upload cost AND what suitable programs are out there
that
can really compress the data in such a way as to allow a more
affordable transfer of data???

What is it you need organized?

You can get a typical, ordinary web host account with the
capacity you need , upload any or all files you want till
you reach that capacity or (typically monthly) bandwidth
limit. If you want to compress it, go right ahead, programs
that ZIP, RAR, etc are not hard to find. Due to having less
control over interruptions in transmission I would avoid
producing very large singular backup files (like backups of
entire partitions) unless broken down into smaller parts.



Having to use a special software to facilitate it all is
inconvenient, yet without special software it is merely a
matter of copying the files anywhere across a network (the
web being one such network) and whether the throughput is
acceptible since nobody wants to wait long to transfer data,
and it could even be their end, their ISP is the bottleneck.