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Non-Tech : The New Iomega '2000' Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Reseller who wrote (852)	6/20/1999 1:50:00 PM
From: Gottfried	Respond to of 5023

Reseller, thanks for your reasoning. Makes sense to me, especially the part about personal records. Gottfried

To: Reseller who wrote (852)	6/20/1999 4:28:00 PM
From: FruJu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5023

Hi Reseller Of your 4 points, I think #1 and #2 are the most pertinent. Privacy is and always will be a big concern. And backups, backups, backups should be the mantra when you have critical data. Of course, not many in the consumer world have learned this yet. But with regards to having net storage, I believe both of your concerns are within reach technologically. Just because current ISPs only provide a measly 5MB of storage per user and don't necessarily guarantee backups doesn't mean that they couldn't (although they would have to make it an optional add-on service on top of the cut-throat $14.95-$19.95/month services) The problem is most ISPs are still working off a PC-oriented mentality where hard drives are hard to add to servers, hard for the OS to transparently use, hard to dynamically share space across multiple users. A lot of these problems have already been solved in the mainframe world, with data vaults where you can hot-swap in additional hard drives when more capacity is needed, the OS can transparently remap the additional space now available, and all of the data is backed up on a rotating schedule to tape, and housed offline in secure buildings. I believe one of the things you'll see is outsourcing of data backup (we're already starting to see it in the business world) moved down to the consumer level, particularly as people start to have fast home connections. With hard drives selling for $0.10/MB within the next 12 months, a company with the brains could develop a service where you pay say an additional $20/month on top of your ISP fee to have 20GB of space on the net, guaranteed to be backed up daily to tape and stored securely. The biggest issue with net backups is customer assurance that data is kept private. This is probably where some sort of education on encryption and security is where companies will have the most work to do.