Seems like a too good to be true type thing, they appear to give free unlimited online storage. I went ahead and signed up, put all my photos up there (like 800 mb), and a few albums of mp3, and it seems pretty useful. There’s a built-in media player that seems to work pretty well, so you don’t have download a pic or mp3 file first to view/play it.
They say here:
I wonder what the “premium upgrade” will offer that is above the value of free online storage and compelling enough to make enough people to buy it to make this profitable.
I could think of a few, the big one being bandwidth. They could throttle download speeds for free accounts. Another idea I’ve seen implemented as a Firefox addon for Gmail is the ability to mount this off-site storage as a network drive on your computer. That would give you transparent drag’n’drop functionality.
Anyways, thanks for the link. I’m looking into offsite backups for my own data.
There is a similar site called www.mozy.com which offers something like 18GB of free backups and unlimited backups for $5 a month. It is a legitimate business and well regarded. I have the unlimited plan myself.
I can’t speak to the site you reference but it looks like this model is becoming more common. Hard drive space is very cheap these days but I still don’t understand how they plan to make money overall.
Looks interesting. It is a little irritating that there’s no postal address in the ‘Contact Us’ page. For that, you have to go to the Terms of Use page: http://www.humyo.com/Pages/TermsOfUse .
They talk a lot about access through the web interface, and later through an application on your PC that maps a drive letter to the Humyo server. There is no FTP access. It sounds like your data would be held and accessed through proprietary protocols. If the company went belly-up, or changed its terms of service to something you didn’t agree with (say, $100 per month), your data would be ‘trapped’.
Then there’s this:
Laws in what jurisdiction? :: scrolls down to the end of the ToS :: Okay, it’s under the laws of England.
I’m going to try it out. I’m curious to see how it behaves with a Mac.
Well, the Javascript or Java in their web pages does not seem to work with Firefox on OS X 10.4.10, although it seems to work somewhat better with Safari.
I uploaded a small file in Firefox, and the Javascript functions in the browser window for managing the file (deleting it, etc) don’t work in FF on OS X. In Safari, the delete function pops up a dialogue box, but pressing Yes on the dialog box results in a “Deleting…” animation that doesn’t stop. Switching to another tab ends the animation, and when you switch back to the file list, the deleted file is gone.
If they’re not going to support two major browsers on Mac OS X, that doesn’t bode well for standards compatibility.
I’m requesting to close my account and sending them a message why.
That’s a good guess. They might also offer synchronization software/service for a few bucks a year. I might pay for that. It’d be nice to have an automatic method of duplicating my music there.
yeah, and Enron was “a legitimate business and well regarded”, too.
Sending data to a web site is too dangerous for me. It leaves you totally helpless, and with no control over whether you will ever see your data again.
Sure, most sites are pretty honest and reliable. And most of my neighbors are honest and reliable, too. But I still lock my door at night.
I keep my data backed up on DVD’s, stored in a box where I have control over them.
You can say that to just about everything in this information age. It isn’t a particularly appropriate or intelligent thing to say especially since huge corporations and the government need to archive data off-site every day. You may feel the need to bury DVD’s in a new hole every day but that doesn’t mean that it is the most logical move.
There has been a dearth of resources for individuals to make back-ups and store to the web until rather recently and I embrace that option. I think that www.mozy.com is reputable but I make DVD backups as well. Mozy.com makes backups every night however and I could still get all of it back even if my house, my external hard drives, and my DVD’s go up in flames.
IIRC they recently picked up a contract with General Electric requiring them to install several petabytes of additional storage. Big customers like that can keep such an operation humming along nicely.
AFA control goes, this is a backup option. Doing a monthly hard backup is still a very good idea. The idea behind mozy and its bretheren is that if your house burns down or you are robbed of computer hardware, your data is backed up offsite. This was a huge PITA before such services existed.
Just as an example, how many businesses died during katrina or 9/11 in part because their computers/office were a total loss. With such a service, you can set up shop elsewhere and reload in a matter of hours on new machines.
Well, turns out “customers who don’t want to upgrade to these services will continue to enjoy the product, as it is, free of charge” was unsustainable (or a lie to begin with). I got an email today from humyo that says
They will charge 19.99 GBP per annum for 100GB of storage.