ReadyNAS Vault : great but overpriced!

If my math is correct it would cost me $9341.64 per year to use ReadyNAS vault, assuming I do not add any data. Given Comcast's recent announcement regarding use of their home service above 250 GB/month (up+down) marking you as an excessive user (and possible termination of service after two months above quota) I'm not even sure how I could get the data to the vault (or any other service).

Server colocation could be an alternative if it wasn't also so expensive (lowest price I found would be $1200 per year). Seems the only option is: buy two ReadyNAS with equal capacity, locally sync them up, take one to a friends house and RSYNC moving forward.

fish -

Thanks for taking interest in user opinion. I agree with you when it comes to the providers you mentioned. Even the venerable Mozy and Carbonite suffer from limitations/restrictions in service use.

I would really like to be able to perform cloud backup of my Readynas' directly from the unit, but choose to use Jungledisk through a desktop instead. I've had such good luck with Jungledisk for the last 3+ years that its hard to consider others. That said, I would possibly consider the Vault service if its pricing model was competitive with Jungledisk. It would also need features such as:

1) AES128/256 encryption with no one else holding the keys but me
2) ability to select directories within a share for selective backup
3) include/exclude lists for file types (such as .tmp or ~*.*)
4) Delta file copy (Comcast isn't the only one with bandwidth caps)
5) Compression of backup data to reduce storage costs
6) previous version backup

7) Deduplication would also be nice, but thats not as critical.

Fish:

Thank you very much for soliciting input. I was becoming used to being ignored on Netgear's forums.

Several others have already responded with some good points. Here is what I would add:

To your point about backing up NAS/UNC's, you are correct in general, and I frankly don't understand the reasoning behind the near universal lack of support for this, given the growing prevalance of NAS in the consumer market. However, it turns out that despite what they say, I have found that pretty much all of them (Acronis, Mozy, etc.) will in fact allow you to back up from a mapped drive if it is mapped at login. The clear disadvantage of having to back up NAS this way is that you must map a drive to each share you want to back up, and the account that does this must be logged in (there are ways around this last point, though). Although it's inconvenient, this method will work and allows one to use reasonably priced services.

Which leads me to your inquiry about alternative pricing plans. I once again don't get why it should matter at all to an online backup vendor where or from what device the data comes; I am purchasing a given amount of backup capacity and should be able to use it in whatever way I choose. I can't see that the source device has any bearing whatever on the cost of providing the service. So, no, I would not be particularly interested in a device-restricted plan. A lower-priced "home use" plan might be of interest to me, but I would need to understand what restrictions it would entail. Would you base such a plan on less frequent backups and therefore lower bandwidth usage, or what?

As for functionality, yes -- I would love to have the ability to see space usage on an individual folder (and subfolder) basis. To my mind, the lack of this feature in a backup product which charges based on space usage is inexplicable except as a mechanism for increasing revenue. In the same vein, the lack of an ability to automatically delete from backup those items which have been deleted at the source hobbles the entire product and again seems like a revenue-enhancement ploy. Providing only for manual data deletion is an overly simplistic form of data protection and makes any kind of space management an exercise in time and patience. It should not be necessary for me to explain better ways of handling this; every other vendor has done so.

Now for some slightly less severe annoyances:

1) Under the Backup/Restore tab, after selecting Manage Backup Jobs, so much (vertical) space is consumed by the top logo and the various banners that the area left for displaying the actual job listing is tiny, requiring constant scrolling. How about maximizing work area and minimzing the extraneous elements?

2) There is no useful help information accessible on the website. Clicking the Help button on the right simply loads the Netgear general support page. How about some FAQ's, at least? Explain how to back up all home directories. Explain how to exclude folders and files; whether wildcards are supported, etc. Explain how the continuous backup works -- how often & what triggers it. I could go on and on here. There is nothing, though. A big FU to the user -- go somewhere else to find the answers, it says.

3) The operation of the website itself has myriad inconsistencies. The one that annoys me the most is the fact that after I delete a subfolder from a folder AND empty the trash, the subfolder still is displayed under the hierarchy in the left pane. This makes it darn difficult to keep track of what I've deleted and what I haven't. This happens with the Trash, too. Put some stuff in there, Empty Trash, and folders and subfolders still show under Trash on the left. Click on Trash, and it says "No Item in Trash", but click on a folder still showing under Trash on the left, and the items within still display. Is the trash emptied or not? Who knows?

4) Reporting is clumsy and unituitive. How about providing standard time ranges (the last week, month, etc.) in addition to the current custom range? How about integrating error information with the backup job status instead of making us have to look it up separately? How about a pie chart showing account usage by share instead of the almost useless total?

And, again, I could go on and on. Really, the ONLY virtue Vault has going for it is the integration with Readynas.

-Randy

Great input. While many of the points your raise and suggestions you offer could justify extensive discussion threads on their own, a few quick thoughts below...

@claykin:

Thanks for helping to highlight the misconception regarding "apples to apples" comparisons. When many of the most aggressive advertisers in the space are offering "unlimited" storage but restricting the devices that are covered, it can be challenging for us to explain the difference.

The software you are currently using is a nice alternative and very reasonable from a cost perspective (essentially passing Amazon S3 costs directly to you). It does not, as you note, currently run natively on the NAS, so a connected host is required. Also, for the same reason, you cannot manage or configure via the web. We are working to devise pricing that will be closer to what you are seeing there.

We also appreciate your suggestions. Some are coming just around the corner (#2 and #3 are really just a matter of exposing the interfaces to you) and almost all the others are part of the road map. If you private message me your username, we can alert you for beta release of this functionality as it becomes available. As a follow up, are the desired features in order of priority or importance to you?

@rschoonh

We can't say for sure why other providers restrict access based on device, but the conventional wisdom in the blogo-sphere appears to be that the make these restrictions for cost management purposes. That is, they may offer "unlimited" or large fixed amounts under the assumption that most users will not actually use that much space. Because outliers who either truly take advantage of the full amount of space offered or test the limits of "unlimited" become very unprofitable very fast for them, they then may institute restrictions that make it practically very unlikely for such outliers to influence their average storage. While sophisticated users have been able, in some instances, to develop work around techniques to use services for unsanctioned devices, these users run the risk of having their service shut off by the providers for violations of the terms of use.

What we can say for sure is that your feature requests (folder level storage visibility and rules-based deletion) are very reasonable and echoed by others in more private communication. We are working on implementing them now and will take the other issues you've identified as problems or annoyances into account as we proceed.

Again, while we are disappointed that you've had a challenging experience, we appreciate the candid and clear feedback very much and will attempt to improve based on your (collective) input.

Some very interesting discussion on this forum. Even though I currently have unlimited storage with Mozy I'm not expecting NetGear to offer exactly the same. The cost model currently on offer is very high by comparison and as stated elsewhere on this topic it is currently exacerbated by the storage being eaten up by old versions and deleted files. But, for this extra cost I get a service far inferior to Mozy. I'm hoping it won't be too long before the service performs well enough to at least be a viable alternative to Mozy (I'd much prefer to directly backup from the NAS rather than via a PC).

I think I need someone to double-check my math on ReadyNAS Vault pricing.

http://www.netgear.com/readynasvault
>>
$199/yr + ($150/yr * 50 GB)
<<

If I currently have 2.5 TB of data on my ReadyNAS that I'd like to back up, that's:

(2500 GB / 50 GB) * $150 = $7500/yr + $199/yr = $7699/yr.

Is that right?

And as ahpsi mentioned, Comcast users would be hard-pressed to push more than 250 GB / month to ReadyNAS Vault.

You got it. That said, Vault is not designed to store all your NAS data. Its designed to store the most critical files and those files that change frequently. For media files you can do local backups and rotate them offsite. Or do NAS to NAS backup.

Anyone who wishes to store 100's or 1000's of GB of data in the cloud is best served by seeding the backup using a USB disk you send to the provider. Several online backup services offer the option for you to send your data via disk for the initial backup.

OK, those are good points. Thanks.

claykin wrote:
You got it. That said, Vault is not designed to store all your NAS data. Its designed to store the most critical files and those files that change frequently. For media files you can do local backups and rotate them offsite. Or do NAS to NAS backup.

I was researching the NAS to NAS option and realized the Duo would make a perfect secondary backup NAS. With discounts and a single 500GB drive, one can be had for < $250USD. However, I was disappointed to learn the Duo doesn't support rsync over SSH so that's not really a viable alternative either. :(

I keep coming back to my original request - give me Amazon S3 as a backup choice in Frontview...please :)

What Netgear really needs to do is sell Vault to someone who can run it more effectively. Netgear is a hardware manufacturer, not a service company- they need to get out of that business.