Comcast Online Backup

Over the past couple months I have had a few friends tell me stories of hard drive crashes that caused them to lose thousands of precious family photos and other files on their computers. I thought well, their own fault for not backing it up. Then I realized that much of the pics, music, photos and videos on my PC are not backed up either. In the past I have backed up to CD but I now have so many files that would be too time consuming. So I decided to research backup solutions.

My first potential solution was an external hard drive. Hard drive space is getting so cheap you can now get a Terabyte external hard drive for less than $100. The downside to an external hard drive is that you are not protected against fire or theft. Also, after reading reviews for some of the drives, reliability seems to be a bit spotty as many customers were experiencing problems with drives overheating or just not working. Not going to do me much good if the drive doesn't work.

My next potential solution was online backup services. These services require a monthly fee and many will allow you to backup unlimited amounts if data. You install a small application on your PC which takes an encrypted one-time back up of all your specified files, then will constantly check for new files and automatically back them up as they are created.

This is a great solution. It is easy, secure and relatively inexpensive. I like the fact that you just install the product and it does all of the work for you. The two major players in the online backup industry are Mozy and Carbonite. The products that they offer are virtually identical, just have a little bit different pricing structure.

Mozy offers unlimited backup for $4.95 / month or $59.40/ year. If your backup needs are on the lower end they do offer 2 gigabytes for free.

Carbonite offers unlimited backup for $4.58 / month or $54.95 /year. They offer a free 15 day trial.

While researching these options I came across an article from Jan 2009 that said Comcast would soon be offering an online backup service to their customers. I searched high and low on the Comcast website and could find nothing regarding online backup. So either Comcast has not rolled the product out to my area or they have decided not to roll it out at all. I am leaning more toward the latter as based on the article the pricing of the product was just not competitive.

The article states that the product will offer several storage plans:

10 GB - $49.99 per year
50 GB - $99.99 per year
250 GB - $239.88 per year

For less than the price of the Comcast 10GB plan you can get unlimited storage space from Mozy or Carbonite. I am guessing that Comcast realized this and scrapped the product. Out of curiosity I did a quick search to see if any other ISP offers online backup to their customers and found that Comcast's major competitor Verizon does. They offer plans based on storage space as well but are more competitive that Comcast's theoretical plan.

Verizon Online Backup & Sharing

Online Backup & Sharing/5 GB - $1.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/25 GB - $4.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/50 GB - $6.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/150 GB - $12.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/250 GB - $19.99 / month

Verizon's plans are still more expensive than Mozy or Carbonite but they are ahead of Comcast by offering a product. I feel that Comcast is really missing the boat here by not offering competitively priced online backup to their customers. Ultimately I would love to see them partner with Mozy or Carbonite and offer the product to their customers for free like they do McAfee Anti Virus. That would save me the $49.95 /year I am now paying for Carbonite. This would probably also help Comcast retain their customers. If a customer has all of their precious files backed up with the price of Internet service they would be less likely to leave for the competition that does not offer the service for free.