I can understand home users wanting / demanding free services – especially today. But for a business it rarely makes sense. If you are a business person, would you expect your own customers to pay nothing for your hard-won skills or researched products? Or would you not believe in the adage that ‘you only get what you pay for’.

Online backup is an insurance policy. And it’s only value is to pay-out.

Free services are often marketing initiatives. Others are loss-making companies in land-grab mode. Some may have little of substance (finance or infrastructure) behind them – think insurance company without a balance sheet.

There is also a difference between simple areas to store data and business grade online backup. The former is a ‘disk in the sky’ – which has some value. The latter needs to account for multiple versions, long-term archiving, compliance and open file/database backup e.g. Exchange or SQL, encryption, bulk restore, etc.

Backup Direct (www.backupdirect.net) supports 2000 businesses in the UK with enterprise-class online backup. We are in the fortunate position of holding multiple technologies and presenting the best fit to our clients.

What our customers want (and the reason they pay us) is secure storage of course. But more importantly, they want support. If we split out the storage element, then we could drop the price per GB to next to nothing. But somehow the experts in the office that know how to recover SQL, Outlook or Sage, etc – need to get paid.

Cheap backup is like a cheap trash/garbage liner – you will only regret using it when the contents of yesterday’s bbq and the dog’s food explode out when taking it out of the kitchen – and you are on your knees trying to clean up with your wife screaming ‘I told you so…’

Brett Raynes
Managing Director
Backup Direct
http://twitter.com/BrettRaynes1

- Anurag R.C.
http://www.pcdrome.com