Easy to Use Cloud Backup Maybe Expensive!

  

A new class of applications may be added to the list of "bandwidth hungry applications", in addition to usual suspects - P2P file sharing and video streaming. The story below shows how cloud based backup services may also consume enormous amounts of bandwidth. DPI vendors - please take care! 

A month ago I covered an article by Mathew Ingram (picture) to Gigaom, describing how he tried to locate what was consuming hundreds of Gigabytes per month on his Rogers home service (see "Every [Canadian] Family Needs a CIO" - here).

Now, Mathew published the sequel - this time with the exact reason - showing how user friendly services might cost the subscriber (in his case, when you have a metered service):

"Then a day or two ago, I got an email from Amazon with the bill for my Amazon AWS service. I have about 25 gigabytes of photos, music and other documents backed up to Amazon’s S3 server cloud, which usually costs me about $3 a month — but this time, the bill said $109 .. The culprit, apparently, was either Windows indexing the files or an anti-virus program scanning them, or both. Since JungleDisk [see the chart for its "bandwidth Limiting Function"] maps the Amazon cloud folder as a network drive, Windows and some other programs simply treat it as a regular drive and download all the files to scan them — even multiple times"

See below Amazon's "Data Transfer Pricing" information.

See "What Happens When the Cloud Meets a Bandwidth Cap" - here.