does the desktop matter anymore?

Posted Sep 29, 2005 3:45 UTC (Thu) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

People do actually advertise outsourced backup services over the Internet. With "military grade" 56-bit DES encryption, even. If I could remember who they were, I'd check to see if they were still around.

The cost proposition for general backups is fairly bad, unless they are able to do something intelligent, like merge identical files from different customers together in their backup database. The bandwidth requirement can be quite high, you typically use a lot of bandwidth sending data that you don't necessarily retrieve, and in the (typical) disaster case, nothing short of 10GBE will be fast enough for an impatient and/or desparate user. This is all costs for the service provider that are incurred by users who hope they'll never really need the service. It's a hard sell to anyone who isn't already desparate to have an off-site copy of their data somewhere (and do you really want such people as your customers? What _is_ this data, anyway? etc).

That said, there are some advantages. If you back up your own machine, you'll need a gigabyte or two for all the system software and applications; however, if someone backs up ten computers like yours, then the marginal disk space used for the 10th customer is just their own personal files. If someone backs up her MP3 collection they downloaded from the internet, it takes up virtually no space as long as the same company also backs up the guy who she downloaded it from. I use this trick myself when backing up 30 machines at the office, and it saves dozens of gigabytes on tape. Over 10,000 customers, the efficiencies could be quite substantial...or the indexing overhead could be crippling. If you are running the service, and you know that the population of users is all e.g. Fedora 4 systems with OpenOffice, then you can give customers a discount on the contents of /usr (because it will be gigabytes of identical data, it will be cheap for you to store, and your customer has the convenience of not having to reinstall it all on restore).

I agree that application-specific web services (particularly those that are heavily optimized to be used by human browsers) are damned annoying things to use in combination with other application-specific web services. Sometimes it is possible to cobble together some Perl scripts that act as a gateway from one web application to another. Sometimes it is possible to cobble together some Perl scripts that combine a few desktop GUI components together, too, and increasingly a bunch of GUI components is starting to look and feel like a bunch of web servers (or is it the other way around?). Sometimes it is just easier to find someone who has put all this stuff together for you in some useful way.