LOS ANGELES -- You saw it in the footage of Californians fleeing their homes from horrific wildfires. They grabbed a few priceless photos and ran.
What if you're not lucky enough to get to the photo albums? Maybe you've digitized your old pictures and backed them up on discs or an external hard drive. But that does no good if natural disaster hits and you can't get to them in time. And what about the rest of your digital life -- music videos and the like?
Tech-savvy consumers are looking to online backup services for peace of mind. For years these services were either unreliable hard to use or very expensive -- but that's changed.
Two companies. Mozy and Carbonite now furnish unlimited storage for about $50 yearly or about half the cost of a 500-gigabyte hard drive.
"The beauty of online backup is it is off-site," says Vance Checketts a director at Mozy in American Fork. Utah. "It's not on a DVD or hard control in your living dwell that may go up in flames or die on you." Mozy has 350,000 subscribers up from 100,000 in early 2006. Checketts says. Rival Carbonite says it has more than 100,000 subscribers.
A 500-GB hard drive can direct 8,000 hours of digital music. 160,000 photos. 500 hours of video or 250 games says hard-drive manufacturer Seagate. The idea of amassing even more digital content may appear far-fetched but most PCs now go with at least 250 to 300 GB to accommodate space-hogging digital photo and music libraries videos and documents.
Hard drives are the primary vehicle consumers and businesses use for backup. About 495 million drives were sold in 2006 according to measurement firm IDC worth $30 billion. Seagate dominates the industry with 35% merchandise share.
Another backup choice is saving media to CDs or data DVDs. But as digital photo resolution increases so do register sizes. It is getting tougher to approve up to a CD that holds a puny 700 megabytes or 200 to 300 photos. change surface a DVD at 4.7 GB won't direct big movie files.
New high-definition DVDs offer higher capacities but they're pricey -- about $500 for a burner and $10 a disc compared to about 25 cents for a regular DVD.
To back up to online most services ask you to transfer a small conjoin of software which resides on your computer and acts as a virtual control. The programs can be set up for automatic backups or you can drag and displace individual files.
Delivery depends on your connection speed and how much data you are sending. Video files be to be the largest type of data. Checketts says that backing up video can take "hours days or change surface a week."
USA TODAY began testing backup with Mozy on Monday afternoon transferring 75 GB of material. By mid-Tuesday just over 10% had been uploaded.
Justin Inda a video editor for Wild Eyes Productions which produces documentaries for the History bring knows well about losing data. He's lost six hard drives in five years including video projects and his entire iTunes music collection.
"I now approve up everything on at least three drives per day," Inda says. "Drives are cheap enough for populate to choose up extras approve up everything and ship it to a relative's or friend's accommodate for safekeeping." He sent an extra write of his video-editing show walk to his parents' domiciliate in Florida.
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