ReadyNAS Vault : great but overpriced!

Oh man, that's disappointing. I bought my Duo yesterday and this was one of the big draws for me, not the only one, but big. I thought it was $6/month unlimited like Carbonite.

Let me add my disappointment with (even the new) pricing...offer an unlimited or TB plan at a FAIR price and you'll increase the membership tenfold. For now, I'll just copy stuff off the 'NAS to a hotfolder that backs up to Carbonite (or similar). If you wanna go the extra mile, you can set up a script to automate the copying...I won't pay the HUGE premium for the Vault, but I would ABSOLUTELY pay for it if it were offered at prices similar to the popular online services.

Shame on you Netgear for trying to get rich off of re-selling a 3rd party service (read ElephantDrive) at an incredible premium :oops:

Another service worth a look at (at least as a SOHO user):

http://www.spideroak.com

Its 100$ a year for 100GB and you can backup a NAS.

In theory it can run on a headless Linux machine, but I haven't tried it yet (far to noob).

In my current set-up it runs on a separate machine.

sschnath wrote:
Without unlimited storage for home users I don't see this service taking off. Too many other options out there.

I agree, 100 gig monthly for 9.99 I would pay easy, the amount offered just is not enough for the price, even the yearly plan is not enough space, though the price point is ok

Totally agree with everyone's comments on this thread - this service is priced beyond reach...

I just cancelled my trail account with this reason:

"I have two ReadyNAS systems totaling approx. 3TB. At the moment I have approx. 1.3TB to backup. Your pricing would place my current need at around $4k./year (that's the cost of 3-4 new 4TB ReadyNAS devices! -- that's crazy pricing for the service). When the price of a 1TB drive is around $80 (purchased) and even with only a one year expected life use I would expect a service to backup 2TB ($160 of HDD space) for no more than the cost of the disk space (that's ~ $13/month). Now consider that I would be a customer for many (many) years along with many (many) other customers. You can make plenty of money with the drives and service (since they both sell each other) - just don't try to do it up front - be in this for the long term relationship with your customers."

Another idea is to view the whole backup/restore business model like an insurance policy. Pay monthly premiums to backup and then, when a disaster strikes, the user would have to pay a deductable for recovery. How would $7/mo/TB premium with a $250/TB deductable (prorated for smaller amounts and say free for below 5GB recovery). Other options would be to have increased deductables for lower monthly costs. The industry will go this way sooner or later - online backup *is* insurance - use a successful business model -- please!

As far as version history is concerned - make it an option... I don't need it. I just need a snapshot of my files. With a ReadyNAS being used to backup my Time Machine I don't care about versions of files on the NAS (the TM contains my version history, I have it set to 2x my HDD capacity). The NAS is a bulk strorage device, not a working volume.

And for those who say that we are paying for convenience and simplicity - give me a break... please understand history; the most successful technology providers do not make access to their technologies proprietary - they make them universal and competitive. The ReadyNAS Vault servive should not be exclusive to ReadyNAS users. Opening up the storage farm and CRM to others will drive down the price, increase competitiveness, and improve the quality (and usability) of the service.

Edit: the online cancellation did not work so I sent support an email and asked them to respond via email or post here.

ajp8164, thanks for your feedback. Your suggestion sounds interesting, however, there is a real cost associated with backing up to a secure datacenter and then propagating that data across other datacenters for redundancy. Along with proper enhancement, maintenance, and support of the system that businesses can depend on. There's just simply no way we'd be able to come close to the pricepoint you suggested.

An alternative for you may be to have a 2nd ReadyNAS that you can place remotely and perform daily rsync backups.

Who backs up 4TB of data to Carbonite (or similar)?
Even at T1 speeds it would take 9 months to transfer to them. How relevant is the data then?

Carbonite give you unlimited because they know that you can't "fill it up". My ISP will shut me down before I get the 4TB uploaded.

--
Fred

fre1621 wrote:
Who backs up 4TB of data to Carbonite (or similar)? Even at T1 speeds it would take 9 months to transfer to them. How relevant is the data then? Carbonite give you unlimited because they know that you can't "fill it up". My ISP will shut me down before I get the 4TB uploaded. -- Fred

Don't forget how long it would take to download it back even if you could upload it.

yoh-dah wrote:
An alternative for you may be to have a 2nd ReadyNAS that you can place remotely and perform daily rsync backups.

That is a good option. Do the first backup on your local network then do incremental backups with the NAS off-site. There's plenty of information available on doing this on this site if you're interested.

I have 6TB worth of storage. This service would cost me up to around $1400 per month to back up, I won't even go into transmission times.

I think I'm going to buy another ReadyNAS and pay a 3rd party to bring in the device, plug it in, run a backup, take it back offsite, rinse and repeat once per week or a few times per month. This will be my disaster recovery plan. It seems to make sense.