BackupReview.info

This very informative site posts up to date news and articles from the industry, and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.

It also features a CEO Spotlight page, where senior management people from the industry are interviewed.

we also keep hearing rumors of google buying fiber, buying wireless spectrum, etc. maybe google’s waiting to fix the upload speed problem and will roll this out then?

The Achilles heel of all online storage as of now is upstream bandwidth. Google or anyone else can offer immense amounts of storage, but getting local files into Gdrive, or whatever, takes a long, long time. Days, not hours, if you want to upload everything, and the process is inherently difficult because of connection difficulties, software glitches, and so on.

None of this is exactly news, but it remains a profoundly annoying fact with no apparent changes in sight. (Unless something’s going on that I don’t know about–which I’d be delighted to hear.)

So Google or any other online storage provider would do well to exert whatever pressure they can on the ISPs who insist on throttling our upload bandwidth.

My theory is that put a bunch of smart ‘kids’ in an open, ‘The Office’ like environment and you have a recipe for severe dysfunction and non-productivity–regardless of how many hours is logged.

125 mb+ isn’t uncommon for Photoshop files with several layers, particularly if you’re starting with a 12 megapixel image.

Personally speaking, as a heavy digital photographer, I probably average 2-4 gb of new photos a weekend. Currently I’m using Amazon s3 + Jungledisk, but mostly for offsite backup – it’s definitely an “overnight backup job thing” rather than a “replacement hard disk” thing.

Unfortunately, the ridiculous cap on my upstream bandwidth prevents me from using it as anything more (fuh-q, Comcast). I’d much rather use my local hard disk for caching and treat it as the “backup”, mostly so that I could utilize my laptop more and not have to worry about synchronization, but that’s impossible due to the limitation of my ISP.

I’d love if Google launched a real competitor to s3 – not because I’m really unhappy with Amazon (the overall cost roughly equals what I’d be spending on an extra hard drive), but because I think competition in the space can only be good for consumers.

And come on… if Amazon and Microsoft can do it, there’s no reason why Google can’t. Minimally, they could enable the ability to access the stuff we have in Docs & Spreadsheets via a mapped Gdrive.